Miss Davis opened a hospital for the wounded; and work-rooms where all,
who could sew, were employed to make clothes and bedding for the horde
of almost naked refugees the Russian, English, German as well as the
Italian ships brought to slumbrous Syracuse. She was one of the prime
movers in the relief work at Syracuse, that the Duke of Genoa said was
the best organized of all he saw. Each man was set to work at the thing
he could do; the tailors made clothes, the cobblers made boots, the
masons, carpenters and painters were employed to finish a large public
building that stood half completed. So these poor people were enabled
from the first to earn their own living, to escape the dreadful
pauperization that in Rome, and almost everywhere else, confronted them.
There remained the “poor things,” the men who had no skill, no trade;
what work could be invented for them? Miss Davis was now entrusted with
large sums of money, the spending of it was left to her judgment. From
the first she maintained that among the able bodied, only those who
worked could be fed. It would have been far easier to issue rations, or
so much money a day to the _profughi_: those methods did not suit the
“Angel of Mercy.” She looked about her, found the roads in a bad
condition; organized and kept at work a road gang, mending the roads of
Syracuse.
The tributes Miss Davis received are wonderfully touching. A poor
organist from Messina composed a song in her honor, dedicated to the
Tortorella (turtle dove); the Sindaco sent her a diploma of honor,
beautifully engrossed with the coat-of-arms of the city; most precious
of all is the address, signed by a long list of her _profughi_,
addressed to the “_Gentile Miss_,” the sublime “Heroine of Charity,” who
is saluted “in the name of the great heart of Ortygia, the center of the
ancient world!”
* * * * *
“After Taormina, Girgenti is the most beautiful place in Sicily,” Patsy
declared.
“Some people say Taormina is the most beautiful place on earth; if you
like to measure--“
“I don’t--I couldn’t--so many places seem best! Wait till you see the
temples though; there’s nothing to compare with them outside Athens.”
We had arrived at the port of Empedocles at sunset, and driven through
the violet dusk up to the town, glowing like a jewelled city on the
heights overlooking river and harbor. I had gone direct to the
comfortable Hotel des Temples, a mile outside Girgente, where again as
at Syracuse we were the only guests. When we met at breakfast, Patsy had
already explored the place.
“We ought to have kept more time for this,” he said; “for us it’s even
more interesting than Syracuse.”
“Girgenti--” I began.
“Call it Acragas, the Greek name, or at least Agrigentum, the Roman,”
Patsy interrupted. “I’ve made friends with the _custode_ of the Temple
of Zeus; he’s like the others, a superior man--here in Sicily they all
seem a cut above the same sort on the mainland.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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