These stories, together with the pictures which illustrated them, had apparently been composed by the men who told them, for they all touched upon contemporary events. In fact, most of them referred in some way to America. Like those songbirds that have only one constantly repeated note, each story-teller had but one story, which he told over and over again, in the same tones, with the same attitudes, and same little dramatic surprises. Although I was not able to understand what was said, it was not difficult to follow the narrative from the pictures. One story told the fortunes of a young girl who had been lured away to America. Perhaps she was one of those "white slaves" to which I noticed a good many references in Italy, and in other of the emigrant countries. At any rate, she was imprisoned in a very dark and dismal place in some part of New York which I was not able to locate from the picture. Then her brother, or perhaps it was her lover, whom she had left behind in Sicily, saw a vision. It was a vision of St. George and the dragon, and after seeing this vision he rose up and went to America and rescued her. The touching thing about it all, the thing that showed how realistic this whole tale was to the crowd that stood and listened to it in rapt attention, was that when the story reached the point where the picture of St. George and the dragon is referred to, the men simultaneously raised their hats. At the same time the speaker assumed a more solemn tone, and the crowd listened with a reverential awe while he went on to relate the miracle by which the young woman had been saved. The sight of this crowd of people, standing bareheaded in an open square, listening reverentially to the story of a street fakir, struck me, like so much else that I saw of the life of the common people in Catania and elsewhere in Sicily, as strangely touching and pathetic. It reminded me of all that I had read and heard of the superstitions of the common people of the country and gave me as insight, such as I had not had before, into the way in which the masses of the people feel toward the Catholic Church, with all its religious ceremonies and symbols. It led me to suspect, also, that much in the religious life of the Sicilian people which looks, perhaps, to those who have had a different training, like superstition, is in fact merely the natural expression of the reverence and piety of a simple-minded and, perhaps, an ignorant people.