It was known that he was ill, but hopes had been held out of his recovery. He had written lately about the _profughi_ he had sheltered in his villa at Sorrento. In these last months, though suffering greatly, he worked early and late for these poor people. He wrote often concerning them. There was no sign of weakness, either in his firm beautiful handwriting or in his brave cheerful words. It was strange to read the story of his death, sympathetically as it was told, in an Italian paper. He died, at sunset on Good Friday, sitting in his chair looking out over the Bay of Naples towards Vesuvius, just as the procession of Mary the Mother, returning from her search for her lost Son, passed his door. The news that his strong heart had ceased to beat cast a shadow over the Camp. Though not one of the company except ourselves had any personal friendship with him, each one felt that he had lost a friend. Our great story-teller had told his last story. Not many men have served their generation as well as he. A wonderful man, more romantic than his romances, more poetic than his poetry, more dramatic than his dramas, his death was in keeping with all the rest--he was an idealist to the last! XVI MESSINA _Ave atque Vale!_ As the steamer bore me away from Messina and towards Naples, I looked my last on the old sickle-shaped harbor of Zancle, on Cape Faro, where the current sweeping through the narrow straits was full of bewildering purple, blue, and green tints like a piece of shot silk. We passed a fishing boat with a man standing on a stunted mast above his fellows at the oars, on the lookout for swordfish; above boat and fishermen towered the crag and castle of Scylla. To the left the glass showed a blur of green--was it a new-leaved fig tree--a descendant of the tree Ulysses clung to as his boat slid by “Scylla’s dread abode?” Why not? Sailor, soldier, traveler, king, vagrants, all come and go; the island and its people remain unchanged. I have bought in a market of Trinacria the “hardening cheese heaped in a wicker basket” that Ulysses saw the Cyclops make from the milk of his sheep and goats. I have heard in the olive groves the shepherd’s flute, the neatherd’s song Theocritus heard and preserved for all time in his verse. As the little steamer churned her way through the Tyrrhene Sea, the sun set, the sky flushed and faded again, the stars came out. Little by little the lights on the shore dwindled to mere diamond points, then in a minute they were gone, and with them that faint perfume of the lemon and orange blossoms that had gone along with us while the breeze was from the land. I have never seen the wonder island again; what remains to tell of the American work there, must be told by others. _Extracts from J.’s Letters_ “Zona Case Americane, April 28, 1909.