While the condition of Negro education in the Southern States is by no means perfect, the Negro, and particularly the Negro woman, has some advantages which are so far beyond the reach of the peasant girl in Sicily that she has never dreamed of possessing them. For example, every Negro girl in America has the same opportunities for education that are given to Negro boys. She may enter the industrial school, or she may, if she choose, as she frequently does, go to college. All the trades and the professions are open to her. One of the first Negro doctors in Alabama was a woman. Every year there are hundreds and, perhaps, thousands of Negro girls who go up from the farming districts of the Southern States to attend these higher schools, where they have an opportunity to come under the influence of some of the best and most cultivated white people in the United States. In the country villages, I venture to say, not one girl in a hundred ever learns so much as to read and write. I was much impressed, as I went about in Sicily, with the substantial character of the buildings and improvements, such as they were. Everything is of stone. Even the most miserable house is built as if it were expected to last for centuries, and an incredible amount of labour has been spent everywhere throughout the country in erecting stone walls. One reason for this is that there is almost no wood to be had for building. Everything is necessarily built of stone and tiles. Another reason, I suspect, why Sicilian people build permanently is because they never expect any change in their condition. If one asks them why they have built their villages on the most inconvenient and inaccessible places, they do not know. They know only that these towns have always been there and they haven't the least idea but what they will remain always where they are. As a matter of fact, in order to find an explanation for the location of these towns, students, I learned, have had to go back several centuries before Christ to the time when the Greeks and the Phoenicians were contending for the possession of the island. At that time the original population took refuge in these mountain fastnesses, and through all the changes since, these towns, with, perhaps, some remnants of the race that originally inhabited the island, have remained.