Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/155

 pipe-stems still; and there were two youngsters from the Lucchese just come down here who died last week like flies, just of our air and our smoking soil. You die early, or never, here.'

She did not answer him. The words sent a chill through her blood; she thought of the man at home. He was young and of the blood of the north; the fever had eaten all the life out of him, and it was still very possible that he never would rally entirely, but would sink away out of apathy into death, as slowly and as surely as the sea was sinking away from the shore and leaving disease and desolation, where once the coral had grown and the dianthus spread his pale pink plumes.

The old sailor mumbled and chattered on of the seaboard as he had remembered it, and the time when he had known the great works begun in 1829 for the drying up of the Castiglione lagoon (once so fair and harmless a lake that we know from Cicero rich men coveted an island on it), and chuckled to himself over his prediction that the bonificamento that was still going on would be only so much squandering of money and labour, and that the salt and