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"Seven years old," he said to me.
A basin was on the ground. They had washed the child's face; two tiny
streams of blood trickled from the two holes.
At the end of the room, near a half-opened clothes-press, in which could
be seen some linen, stood a woman of some forty years, grave, poor, clean,
fairly good-looking.
"
A neighbor," E.P. said to me.
He explained to me that a doctor lived in the house, that the doctor had
come down and had said, "There is nothing to be done." The child had
been hit by two balls in the head while crossing the street to "get out
of the way." They had brought him back to his grandmother, who "had no
one left but him."
The portrait of the dead mother hung above the little bed.
The child had his eyes half open, and that inexpressible gaze of the
dead, where the perception of the real is replaced by the vision of the
infinite. The grandmother spoke through her sobs by snatches: "God! is
it possible? Who would have thought it?--What brigands!"
She cried out,--
"Is this then the Government?"
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