“I devoted some of the dark hours on my tiles to profound philosophic reflection upon the Taorminian methods with children,” she continued. “I have often thought the ennui suffered by children and pet animals was the cause of much of their restless fretfulness. Even the most undeveloped nature feels the difference between a real occupation and an imitation one; feels the importance of being an economic factor. Now those Taormina children from the age of two years are made to feel they are really important and necessary 147members of the family. They knit as soon as they can walk; they sew, they do drawn-work, at five. They sit in the streets at little tables and help cobble shoes or mend teakettles. They shop for busy parents; they fetch and carry. They pull out of the gardens and orchards weeds as tall as themselves, and everywhere are calm and self-respecting, and receive from their parents and their grown-up neighbours that serious courtesy and consideration due to useful and well-behaved citizens. One does not slap or jerk or scold valuable and important members of the community, and no youthful Taorminian would permit such an unjustifiable liberty from a parent.” Borne on this flood of words they suddenly flowed out into a big irregular square where stood one of the most curious buildings in the world; the great temple of Pallas of the Syracusans. The enormous fluted Doric columns were sunk into the walls of a Cathedral, for Zosimus, bishop of Syracuse in the Seventh Century, had seized the columned frame and had plastered his church upon it—but so great was the diameter of the pillars that their sides and capitals protruded through the walls inside and out like the prodigious stone ribs of some huge skeleton. The Saracens had come later, and, after slaughtering the priests and women who clung shrieking to the altars, had added battlements to the roof, and the Eighteenth Century, being unable, of course, to keep its finger out of even the most reverend pie, had gummed upon the portal a flaring baroque façade of yellow stone. But through all disfigurements and defacements the temple still showed its soaring majesty, and Peripatetica, at sight of it, cried: 148“One dead in the fields!”... For suddenly was revealed to the two the meaning of what they had been journeying to see—it was the dead body of a great civilization.