This middleman is called by Italians a gobellotto, and he seems to be the only man in Sicily who is getting rich out of the land. If a gobellotto has a capital of $12,000 he will be able to rent an estate of 2,500 acres for a term of six to nine years. He will, perhaps, work only a small portion of this land himself and sublet the remainder. Part of it will go to a class of farmers that correspond to what are known in the South as "cash renters." These men will have some stock, and, perhaps, a little house and garden. In a good season they will be able to make enough to live upon and, perhaps, save a little money. If the small farmer is so unfortunate, however, as to have a bad season; if he loses some of his cattle or is compelled to borrow money or seed, the middleman who advances him is pretty certain to "clean him up," as our farmers say, at the end of the season. In that case, he falls into the larger and more unfortunate class beneath him, which corresponds to what we call in the Southern States the "share cropper." This man, corresponding to the share cropper, is supposed to work his portion of land on half-shares, but if, as frequently happens, he has been compelled to apply to the landlord during the season for a loan, it goes hard with him on the day of settlement. For example, this is the way, according to a description that I received, the crop is divided between the landlord and his tenants: After the wheat has been cut and thrashed--thrashed not with a machine, nor yet perhaps with flails, but with oxen treading the sheaves on a dirt floor--the gobellotto subtracts from the returns of the harvest double, perhaps triple, measure of the seed he had advanced. After that, according to the local custom, he takes a certain portion for the cost of guarding the field while the grain is ripening, since no man's field is safe from thieves in Sicily. Then he takes another portion for the saints, something more for the use of the threshing floor and the storehouse and for anything else that occurs to him. Naturally he takes a certain portion for his other loans, if there have been any, and for interest. Then, finally, if there is nothing further to be subtracted, he divides the rest and gives the farmer his half. As a result the poor man who, as some one has said, "has watered the soil with his sweat," who has perhaps not slept more than two hours a night during the harvest time, and that, too, in the open field, is happy if he receives as much as a third or a quarter of the grain he has harvested. In the end the share cropper sinks, perhaps, still lower into the ranks of day labourer and becomes a wanderer over the earth, unless, before he reaches this point, he has not sold what little property he had and gone to America.