Around the Heel nearly all the settlements are well back from the coast, and strange to say the reason is, not that it is healthier or more convenient, but that in the Middle Ages they were established there because it was not safe to live alongshore. Since then no one has thought of changing; in fact the entire region, except as it has been stirred by the letters of emigrants and the doctrines of Socialists and Anarchists, seems to live by the precept, “What is, is best.” Something of the deep establishment of customs and of the religious state of the country can be gathered from the following. In Bari there is the Church of San Nicola, than whom there is no more revered saint in all Italia Meridionale, wherefore note the number of Nicolas. In the crypt his remains are supposed to be encased in a tomb from which exudes on and about the 8th of May an oily substance that is miraculous. Pilgrims come for the feast of the 8th of May by thousands and thousands, and nearly all of them are in the costume of the remoter villages. On the promontory at Cotrone stands a pillar which marks the site of the temple of Hera, once the goddess of all the peoples about the Gulf of Taranto, but now it has for a neighbor the Church of the Madonna del Capo, and each Saturday young girls from the region about go in procession to the church in their bare feet, all clad in white. The people in many of the towns are primitive, especially in the Basilicatan Mountains, where strangers are often as unwelcome as they are to-day among the mountaineers of East Tennessee. Some few families control nearly all the tillable land, and exact from the poor peasants one-half of all they produce on it for rent. To the American farmer who has been long accustomed to raising a crop on shares, that does not sound very bad, but the _latifondo_, as this system is called, is one of the curses of Italia Meridionale to-day, and in that portion of this narrative which deals with our studies in Sicily, where the same condition prevails as in Apulia, Basilicata, and Calabria, I shall give more definite expression on the system. One of the very powerful families in this region is the Baracco family, and they literally hold in their hands the fate of a vast region. Not only is the country very primitive in spots, but in some it is exceedingly wild. About Mount Vulture, and especially in the great half-destroyed lateral crater, the forests are so dense as to be almost impenetrable, and wolves and wild boars are numerous. Leaving entirely the consideration of the regions of the Heel, and speaking only of Basilicata and Calabria, which have been pouring emigrants into the United States, there should be mentioned the great enemy of the peasant, which has driven more men to America than any other thing, the terrible _torrente_.