Among the things that make Sicily interesting are its ruins. There are dead cities which even in their decay are larger and more magnificent than the living cities that have grown up beside them--larger and more magnificent even than any living city in Sicily to-day. There are relics of this proud and ancient past everywhere in this country. In the modern city of Catania, for example, I came suddenly one day upon the ruins of the forum of a Roman city which was buried under the modern Italian one. At Palermo I learned that when the members of the Mafia, which is the Sicilian name for the "Black Hand," want to conceal a murder they have committed, they put the body in one of the many ancient tombs outside the city, and leave it there for some archæologist to discover and learn from it the interesting fact that the ancient inhabitants of Sicily were in all respects like the modern inhabitants. Among the other antiquities that one may see in Sicily, however, is a system of agriculture and method of tilling the soil that is two thousand years old. In fact, some of the tools still in use in the interior of the island are older than the ruins of those ancient heathen temples, some of which were built five centuries before Christ. These living survivals, I confess, were more interesting to me than the dead relics of the past. These things are not easy to find. The guide-books mention them, but do not tell you where to look for them. Nevertheless, if one looks long enough and in the right place it is still possible to see in Sicily men scratching the field with an antique wooden plow, which, it is said, although I cannot vouch for that, is mentioned in Homer. One may see a Sicilian farmer laboriously pumping water to irrigate his cabbage garden with a water-wheel that was imported by the Saracens; or one may see, as I did, a wine press that is as old as Solomon, and men cutting the grapes and making the wine by the same methods that are described in the Bible. It was my purpose in going to Sicily to see, if possible, some of the life of the man who works on the soil. I wanted to get to the people who lived in the little villages remote from the larger cities. I was anxious to talk with some of these herdsmen I had seen at a distance, wandering about the lonesome hillsides, tending their goats and their cows and perhaps counting the stars as the shepherds did in the time of Abraham. As there are some 800,000 persons engaged in agriculture in one way or another, it did not seem to me that this would be difficult. In spite of this fact, if I may judge by my own experience, one of the most difficult persons to meet and get acquainted with in this country, where many things are strange and hard to understand, is the man who works out in the open country on the land.