Most of the villa people are trembling with fear. What is to be done with these homeless wretched people? God only knows. It’s over a week now since the earthquake; the trains still come in filled to overflowing with injured taken every day from the ruins.” “The German battle-ship ‘Serapim,’” says Miss Lee, “brought a great number of refugees. One music hall singer had her little canary on her finger; the little creature was singing, the only happy thing on that dreadful ship. I worked for over three weeks at the station of Giardini. One night Mr. Kitson was going through the Red Cross car, helping with milk, wine and so forth. At the end of the car was a large clothes basket full of little new-born babies, two dead, three or five alive, and nothing to cover them or keep them warm, so the dead ones had been kept for that. They had been born on the train and had had no one to tend them, poor little souls. It made him perfectly sick and was, we think, partly responsible for his long illness. I was kept in the surgical ward room to have the water ready for the doctors and so I did not see all the horrors as those did who went through the cars--I was spared that, thank God.” III AMERICA TO THE RESCUE On the first of January, three days after the great earthquake, a band of Calabrians, living in New York, flashed this message across the Atlantic to their mother country: “Do not forget Scylla!” Scylla, how the old name thrills! Scylla had suffered severely, though its gray castle, perched high on the cliff that rises sheer from the shore, was spared. Scylla, the ancient village at the foot of the purple Calabrian mountains, was not forgotten, nor Reggio, nor the white fishing hamlets that line the tawny shores of Sicily and Calabria on either side of the restless straits. The people of the coast were soonest reached and soonest helped by the sailors of the passing ships, for the navies of the world flew on the wings of love and pity to succor the stricken ports. Never were ships watched for with such eagerness, never were sailors greeted with such passionate rapture since Theseus sailed back from Crete to Athens with his precious freight of Athenian youths and maidens, saved from the dreadful Minotaur. The people who lived in the hills and valleys of the interior suffered longest, were last relieved; but even to them help came, for the sailors were faithful and carried the world’s bounty to the desolate inland towns of Sicily and Calabria. The story of their labor of love would fill an encyclopedia. This is the story of the American relief ship “Bayern,” that brought comfort and hope to the forlorn survivors of the great earthquake; to tell the story clearly, we must go back to Rome where the cruise was planned.