Excerpt from Poverina: A Story In this peaceful and primitive valley every one lived by the earth, and loved it as a mother and a nurse. N o manufactories, no industries, small or great, were there to seduce the peasants into the belief that there was work more lucrative than agriculture. Commerce was nothing. A cigar-manufactory and a few silk-weavers afforded some occupation to the most active among the women and young girls but the men who are in haste to grow rich, or to make more money than the soil can furnish, must expatriate themselves. They continually go away to Corsica to cultivate the land at excellent salaries, or to Merica, generally to Montevideo, whence they bring back a little gold and many paroquets and other strange birds but come back they always do to their native valley. There is scarcely an instance of a Lucca peasant establish ing himself permanently in a foreign land. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.