Note J — Chapter VII · THE CORSICAN DIRGES.

The irony is here so wild as to be at first hardly intelligible. Red is usually a gay and festive colour; when she is disposed to be gay—when her absorbing grief leaves her "leisure for laughing," as she says in the original, it will be when she can wear a mandile dyed in her father's blood—that is, never. By the bold figure in the concluding lines of the vocero, she intimates at once the victim's innocence and the cruel circumstances of his death.—Tr.