once, seeing the child in the sea on a stormy day, when she looked no bigger than a seabird on the crest of foam; and from that time she was known by that word chiefly, and also as the Musoncella.
'Musoncella!' the other children yelled after her; for in the songs that are sung in the Maremma, round the charcoal burner's fires in the forest, and on the decks of the fishing feluccas on the sea, and behind the driven buffaloes in the reedy swampy plains, the girl that turns her face away is always twitted with this epithet.
Far il muso is to be scornful of, and sullen to, your kind: to have the black dog on your back as northerns phrase it.
It troubled Joconda to have that good name of Maria Penitente so utterly put aside and abandoned. It seemed as if the saints rejected the child of Saturnino, she thought. But when a popular tide of feeling rises high, no one can change it, even when it only sets toward a trick of speech in a fishing village, and Velia or Musoncella, the child was called by one and all, even by Joconda, who could not get out of the contagion of the nicknames.
She would not play with others; she
