The posters were the same, and the general character of emigrant-departure bustle the same, that we had seen in the Boot, but over Messina there seemed to be a spell of greater prosperity and activity than over any of the other southern Italian towns. The streets were strikingly clean. The people walked almost as rapidly as Americans. The pretentiousness of Naples and Rome was missing. Business houses seemed to be built and used for business houses only. On the water front three American emblems were visible,—one over the door of the consulate where I knew Mr. Charles M. Caughey of Baltimore to preside, and the other two over wide-open doors decorated with huge white signs “AMERICAN BAR.” I learned later that the two wine-shops where they really can set out a good dry cocktail and a standard gin rickey are owned, one by a father and the other by his son. The father emigrated to New York about the time of the Civil War, and according to reports boasts of having jumped the bounty three times, and amassed a fortune in the saloon business in New York. The son is also keeping bar, because it is the only thing he knows how to do, and is waiting for his father to die, when I fancy there will be one less American flag on the water front of Messina. Both father and son are American citizens, and are much in demand with the emigrants; and from all I could gather they and their operations could be very well dispensed with. We stopped in Messina only long enough to get fed, freshened, and in some small degree rehabilitated, and then took train for Gualtieri-Sicamino, intending to use that place as a base of observations in Sicily. Having heard from Italians of the north that the people of southern Italy were for the most part low-browed swine, and having found the people in the Boot to be decent, kind-hearted and hard-working, though ignorant and poor, we were prepared to doubt the Sicilians to be the bloodthirsty, stiletto-using banditti, such as they are popularly supposed to typify. It was a real gratification to find the first representatives we met to be of a thoroughly desirable type _considered from the standpoint of good raw material for a great growing nation_. Nor did we have occasion thereafter to change our first estimates.