At that time Italy was not a single country as now but like Germany a collection of small states. Some of these were independent, some were owned by France, some were owned by Austria. The king of one of these Italian states was Victor Emmanuel. He wanted all the Italian states to unite and become one single country like our United States. He was helped by his prime minister, a very able man named Cavour, and by a rough but romantic popular hero named Garibaldi, who was called the hero of the Red Shirt. Garibaldi, who had been a candle-maker in New York City, was always poor and seemed not to care for money. He was so popular that whenever he called for soldiers to fight with him for his beloved Italy, they at once flocked around him ready to fight to the death. And so at last these three, Victor Emmanuel, Cavour, and Garibaldi, succeeded in making their country one big nation. The Italians erected monuments to them and named streets after them. To Victor Emmanuel they built a magnificent building on a hill in Rome overlooking the city, a building that was intended to be more beautiful than anything built in Athens during the time of Pericles or in Italy during the Renaissance. If you collect postage-stamps it would be interesting for you to get, if you can, stamps of these countries at that time, the New French Republic, United Germany, and United Italy. [Illustration: 1870] 77 The Age of Miracles You may think the Age of Miracles was when Christ lived. But if a man who lived at that time should come back to earth now he would think _this_ the Age of Miracles. If he heard you talk over a wire to a person a thousand miles away, he would think you a magician. If you showed him people moving and acting on a movie screen, he would think you a witch. If he heard you start a band playing by turning on a phonograph, he would think you a devil. If he saw you fly through the air in an airplane, he would think you a god. We are so used to the telephone, telegraph, and phonograph; to steamboats, steam railroads, and trolley-cars; to electric lights, motor-cars, moving pictures, radio, and airplanes, that it is hard to imagine a world in which there were none of these things--absolutely none of these things. Yet in the Year 1800 not a single one of these inventions was known. Neither George Washington nor Napoleon ever saw a steam-engine, a steam-car, nor a steamboat. They had never used a telephone nor a telegraph nor a bicycle. My own grandfather never saw a trolley-car nor an electric light. Even my father never saw a phonograph, a moving picture, an automobile, nor a flying-machine. More wonders have been made in the last hundred years than in all the previous centuries of the world put together.