Some of the cultivated people we met, who have lost every one belonging to them, showed a calm, a manner of putting it all behind them that is admirable. The grief for one person, greatly loved in a family, casts a greater and longer shadow apparently than these awful catastrophes. It seems also that nothing that happens to any one else can affect us as much as what happens to ourselves. Those people who have looked death in the face and escaped seem, almost against their volition, to bloom out and to rejoice in life itself, even though they seem to have lost everything that makes life dear. I must confess that I felt this with the people who had come into property by the death of all their families, and not with those who had lost everything. I suppose this is perfectly human and natural. Our last day at Taormina we had tea in the enchanted garden, with some of our Sicilian friends. In an upper room of the Timeo, Tetrazzini was singing (through the Victor) the great aria from Mignon; when it was finished, Caruso sang his song from l’Africaine. “To hear the Etna among tenors, while we are looking at Mt. Etna,” said Patsy, “gives one a faint idea of what the old Taorminians enjoyed in their theatre!” The music over, we sat talking with our friends. One of the men, a professor, lassoed and caught round the neck a little green lizard; very soon the pretty creature was quite tame. “Be thou quiet or I shall hurt thee, little one!” said the Professor, as he cut the lasso, and the lizard ran away with a necklace round his throat. The talk ranged wide, of books, operas, artists, everything but what was at hand. Finally the Professor held up a warning finger: “Listen, the nightingale! He never says the same thing twice--while we--” he shrugged his shoulders, picked a scarlet poppy and stuck it in his coat. * * * * * “That’s Luigi,” said Patsy, as we waited for the Syracuse train on the platform at Giardini, “that beautiful old fellow with the white beard! Bonanno told me about him. He was driven quite mad by the earthquake--benevolently mad, he’s perfectly good-natured. His mind is destroyed, as far as today is concerned. What’s left alive is the most interesting thing of his life--he was one of the ‘Mille;’ he sailed from here with Garibaldi for Calabria in 1860, nearly fifty years ago--he must have been a mere boy then, can’t be so very old now--looks hard as nails. The arrival of a train seems to be his link with the past. He meets them all, and marches up and down the platform, singing patriotic songs. He doesn’t beg; I tried to give him something the other day, and he would not take it.”