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chair. The police-man held a brown goat on a leash of rope; the goat was browsing on the clothes.
    “No one has claimed him,” he said. “Do you want him?”
    Henry said no. Once untied, the goat bounded off, first in the direction of the mules and then veering off into the dunes, chased by two determined pickers.
    All that day Henry wandered the beach, speaking to the pickers and the sailors to see if they knew anything aboutthe Ossolis’ belongings, if they had seen any papers, but with no luck. The few surviving sailors now working on the marble crew were able to tell him more of the story.
    The voyage of the Elizabeth had been troubled nearly from the first; soon after leaving Livorno on May 17th, the captain had died of typhus at Gibraltar. The ship sat in harbor under quarantine for a week, and then the first mate had taken charge. The Ossolis’ boy then also came down with typhus, but a milder version than the captain’s; he survived. Later, fierce winds hit just south of New York, and though the crew expected the mate to find a safe harbor and wait out the gale, he had pushed on.
    Around three in the morning the ship, heavy with its marble cargo, had run aground on a sand bar. The marble slabs slid and thrust through the hull, and then the water poured in. Some five or six of the crew made it to shore by paddling on planks, and this was when the first unlucky sailor drowned. Those who landed on the beach were able to set up a make-shift tow-line, by which the rest of the crew and Mrs. Hasty, the late captain’s wife, had struggled in — but the Italian girl had lost her grip on the rope and had been swept away in a rip current. The waves and wind were too loud to hear anyone scream, and the darkness was almost total.
    Ossoli and his wife would not leave the ship without their son and the baby was of course too small to use the tow-line, or even to hold on to an adult. They were waitingfor a promised life-boat from the nearest town. But instead of easing, the storm worsened; the tow-line broke; the ship broke up and began to sink. The ship was so close that those on shore saw clearly as Ossoli was next washed away. In the early dawn, a sailor actually swam back out to the wreck and took the child from his mother’s arms and made for shore. Within minutes, he and the boy had been beaten and killed in the ferocious surf, pulled back again and again by the undertow. Then the woman was alone, most of her skirts torn away, sitting with her back pressed against the mast, her knees at her chin. Finally an enormous wave covered her as well and she disappeared.
    One sailor told Henry how much the crew had liked the lady, how she had expertly nursed the sick captain and a sailor at Gibraltar early in the voyage and then had nursed her own son without panic. Past the Canaries, once the boy was out of danger, she became sociable; one night, she joined the crew below and told them the story of Aeneas and the founding of Rome. For many nights thereafter, he said, she had told stories from Virgil, with long pauses to allow for translation for the Italian men in the crew — for although she did speak some Italian, they had laughed at her accent and formal style and so she had wisely stayed with English.
    “Dido’s death by fire,” said Henry thinking suddenly, vividly, of the way Margaret had sometimes looked at Emerson.
    “She could tell a story! Waving her arms, she had a beautiful voice, she looked like an angel. The boy sitting on her lap just stared up at her face.”
    Another sailor, Bolton, whose good pal had tried to save the child, showed Henry to the small grave-yard and its scrap-wood crosses. “We have to keep the pickers away from here or they’d take these too, for fire-wood.” Bolton was talking too much, still had a shocked look about the eyes, as he told of the mother handing her child into the sailor’s arms. “The husband was gone under already, but she held the boy above the water and handed him