Such is the peasant poet of to-day; such he was five hundred or a thousand years ago. He presents a not unlovely picture of a stage in civilisation which is not ours. To-morrow it will not be his either; he will learn to read and write; he will taste the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil as it grows in our great centres of intellectual activity; he will begin to "look before and after." Still, he will do all this in his own way, not in our way, and so much of his childhood having clung to him in youth, it follows that his youth will not wholly depart from him in manhood. Through all the wonderfully mixed vicissitudes of his country the Sicilian has preserved an unique continuity of spiritual life; Christianity itself brought him to the brink of no moral cataclysm like that which engulfed the Norseman when he forsook Odin and Thor for the White Christ. It may therefore be anticipated that the new epoch he is entering upon will modify, not change his character. That he has remained outside of it so long, is due rather to the conditions under which he has lived than to the man; for the Sicilian grasps new ideas with an almost alarming rapidity when once he gets hold of them; of all quick Italians he is the quickest of apprehension. This very intelligence of his, called into action by the lawlessness of his rulers and by ages of political tyranny and social oppression, has enabled him to accomplish that systemization of crime which at one time bred the Society of the Blessed Pauls, and now is manifested in the Mafia. You cannot do any business harmless or harmful, you cannot buy or sell, beg or steal, without feeling the hand of an unacknowledged but ever present power which decides for you what you are to do, and levies a tax on whatever profit you may get out of the transaction. If a costermonger sells a melon for less than the established price, his fellows consider that they are only executing the laws of their real masters when they make him pay for his temerity with his life. The wife of an English naval officer went with her maid to the market at Palermo, and asked the price of a fish which, it was stated, cost two francs. She passed on to another stall where a fish of the same sort was offered her for 1.50. She said she would buy it, and took out of her purse a note for five _lire_, which she gave the vendor to change. Meanwhile, unobserved, the first man had come up behind them, and no sooner was the bargain concluded, than he whipped a knife out of his pocket, and in a moment more would have plunged it in the second man's breast, had not the lady pushed back his arm, and cried by some sudden inspiration, "Wait, he has not given me my change!" No imaginable words would have served their purpose so well; the man dropped the knife, burst out laughing, and exclaimed: "Che coraggio!" The brave Englishwoman nearly fainted when she returned home. Her husband asked what was the matter, to which she answered: "I