Not everyone in Sicily can marry according to his desire and the apparent fitness of things; for there are old feuds between parish and parish, as bitter as were ever those of Guelf and Ghibelline in times past; and the devotees of one saint will have as little to say to the devotees of another as will Jew and Gentile, True Believer and Giaour. In early times this local rivalry was, naturally, more pronounced than it is at present; but even now in Modica it is extremely rare if a San Giorgioaro marries a Sampietrana, or vice versâ—each considering the other as of a different and heretical religion. A marriage made not long ago between two people of these several parishes turned out ill solely on the religious question, the husband and wife not agreeing to differ, but each wanting to convert the other from the false to the true faith, and indignant because of ill-success. Just lately, says Dr. Pitrè, a Syracusan girl, whose patron saint was Saint Philip, and who was betrothed to a young man of the confraternity of the Santo Spirito, sent all adrift because, a few days before the marriage was to take place, she went to see her lover, lying ill in bed, and found hanging to the pillow a picture of the objectionable Santo Spirito. Whereat, furious and enraged she snatched down the picture, tore it into a thousand pieces which she trampled under foot, and then and there made it a sine quâ non that her husband-elect should substitute for this a picture of Saint Philip. This the young man refused to do; and the marriage was broken off. Here in Sicily, as elsewhere, the seafaring population have little or nothing to say to the landsfolk by way of marriage; holding themselves more moral, more industrious, and in every way superior to those who live by the harvests of the earth or by the quick returns and easy profits of trade. But there is much more than this. The daughter of a small landed proprietor will not be given to the master of men in any kind of business, nor will the son of the former be suffered to marry the daughter of the latter. A peasant farmer, without sixpence, would not let his girl marry a well-to-do shepherd. A workman or rather a day laborer—“bracciante”—would not be received into the family of a muleteer, nor he again into one where the head was the keeper of swine or of cattle. The husbandman who can prune vines disdains the man who cannot dig, let him be what he will; the cow-herd disdains the ox-herd, and he again the man who looks after the calves. The shepherd is above the goat-herd; and so on, down to the most microscopic differences, surpassing even those of caste-ridden India.