From where we stood we could look out over the country and see in several places the elaborate and expensive works that had been erected for pumping water by steam for the purposes of irrigation. One of the small farmers I visited had a small engine in the back of his house which he used to irrigate a garden of cauliflower about four acres in extent. This man lived in a little low stone and stucco house, but he was, I learned, one of the well-to-do class. He had an engine for pumping water which cost him, he said, about $500. I saw as I entered his place a little stream of water, not much larger than my thumb, drizzling out of the side of the house and trickling out into the garden. He said it cost him between $4 and $5 a day to run that engine. The coal he used came from England. I had seen, as I entered the Palermo harbour, the manner in which this coal was unloaded, and it gave me the first tangible evidence I had found of the cheapness of human labour in this over-populated country. Instead of the great machines which are used for that purpose in America and England, I learned, this work was all done by hand. In order to take this coal from the ship it was first loaded into baskets, which were swung over the side of the vessel and there piled upon a lighter. This lighter was then moved from the ships to the shore. The baskets were then lifted out by hand and the coal dumped on the wharf. From these it was reloaded into carts and carried away. It was this coal, handled in this expensive way, that this farmer was using to pump the water needed to irrigate his land. After leaving Palermo I went to Catania, at the other side of the island. The railway which climbs the mountains in crossing the island took me through a very different country and among very different people than those I had seen at Palermo. It was a wild, bare, mountainous region through which we passed; more bare, perhaps, at the time I saw it than at other times, because the grain had been harvested and plowing had not begun. There were few regular roads anywhere. Now and then the train passed a lonely water-wheel; now and then I saw, winding up a rocky footpath, a donkey or pack-mule carrying water to the sulphur mines or provisions to some little inland mountain village. Outside of these little villages, in which the farm labourers live, the country was perfectly bare. One can ride for miles through this thickly populated country without seeing a house or a building of any kind, outside of the villages.