The cigarette king, breathing defiance, repeated: "I will make of it a test case." "Better let George do it," I urged. And when his name was called, a name that is as well known from Kavalla to Smyrna in tobacco-fields, sweetmeat shops, palaces, and mosques, as at the Ritz and the Gaiety, the cigarette king wisely accepted for his four sovereigns Italian lire. At their rate of exchange, too. Later, off Capri, he asked: "When you advised me to let George make a test case of it, to which of our fellow passengers did you refer?" In the morning the _Adriaticus_ picked up the landfall of Messina, but, instead of making fast to the quay, anchored her length from it. This appeared to be a port regulation. It enables the boatman to earn a living by charging passengers two francs for a round trip of fifty yards. As the wrecked city seems to be populated only by boatmen, rowing passengers ashore is the chief industry. The stricken seaport looks as though as recently as last week the German army had visited it. In France, although war still continues, towns wrecked by the Germans are already rebuilt. But Messina, after four years of peace, is still a ruin. But little effort has been made to restore it. The post-cards that were printed at the moment of the earthquake show her exactly as she is to-day. With, in the streets, no sign of life, with the inhabitants standing idle along the quay, shivering in the rain and snow, with for a background crumbling walls, gaping cellars, and hills buried under acres of fallen masonry, the picture was one of terrible desolation, of neglect and inefficiency. The only structures that had obviously been erected since the earthquake were the "ready-to-wear" shacks sent as a stop-gap from America. One should not look critically at a gift-house, but they are certainly very ugly. In Italy, where every spot is a "location" for moving-pictures, where the street corners are backgrounds for lovers' trysts and assassinations, where even poverty is picturesque, and each landscape "composes" into a beautiful and wondrous painting, the zinc shacks, in rigid lines, like the barracks of a mining-camp, came as a shock. Sympathetic Americans sent them as only a temporary shelter until Messina rose again. But it was explained, as there is no rent to pay, the Italians, instead of rebuilding, prefer to inhabit the ready-to-wear houses. How many tourists the mere view of them will drive away no one can guess.