thick-tongued cactus and the century plant, and geraniums, red and pink, in blossom. Here and there one saw onestory, tile-roofed houses, gray with the mold of time, standing in the middle of tiny farms set off by cactus hedges. Although it was only 5:30 o'clock when I raised my curtain and looked out, men were already in the fields tearing up the soil with a Calabrian plow, a large-bladed hoe, and afloat watching for swordfish. Barefooted girls, with flowing kerchiefs on their heads, tending grazing giant gray cattle, waved their hands to the train as it ambled past them. In the door of a hut near the track sat a mother with a naked babe on her lap, the morning sun bathing its fat, ruddy body.

The sun glared hotly down out of an unclouded blue sky. I raised the hood of the carrozza as it turned up the long street which leaves Messina by way of the valley of the dry river-bed and climbs over the treeless hills to Gesso. For two hours we climbed at snail's pace along the hard, white macadamized ribbon that winds back and forth, labyrinthine fashion, through the convolutions of the hills, until the mind is ready to believe that a map of it would look like a seismograph record and all sense of the points of the compass is lost. But if the mind can no longer follow the turnings of the road, the imagination has opportunity to regale itself upon almost celestial food. As one climbs, wider and wider views are caught of the band of deep blue water flowing between Scylla and Charybdis, ancient Rhegium gleaming on the far side, and the theatrical background of deeply scored Calabrian hills, their colors of garnet, pink, and green softened by a blue haze. We stopped a moment to rest the horses and moisten their mouths at a wayside trough; two or three high, two-wheeled farm carts drawn by small horses trapped in red and brass, and driven by good-natured peasants, approached. The carts were gay with scenes from Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso," and Sicilian history, painted in the primary colors, on their sides.

A herd of goats tended by a bronzed and wrinkled ancient scrambled up the steep bank as we rounded the shoulder of the summit and the expanse of the

Mediterranean greeted one's vision and the eyes focused on the Lipari Islands and the smoking, truncated cone of Stromboli.

An hour's ride down the mountainside brought us to Gesso. On the outskirts of the town I left the carriage and walked down through the main street. It was almost as deserted as the streets of Pompeii. The appearance of an American drew forth from the dank, stone-flagged houses scores of women, children, and wrinkled old men. One was surprised to see so few young and middle-aged men. The reason was given by the syndic, or mayor. They were in America. A few years ago Gesso had a population of nearly six thousand persons. To-day the houses with the wormeaten wooden doors are peopled by only about eighteen hundred women, children, and old men, who are supported largely by money sent home from America by the able-bodied men who have gone hence.

In a crowd of children that followed me as if I were some Pied Piper was a hunchbacked youth. Had he any relatives in America? Yes, two brothers and a brother-in-law, in Brooklyn and Philadelphia. He had wished to go himself, but had been rejected at Naples because of his bent back. The effectiveness of the American law excluding those of poor physique was demonstrated in the residuum of men in Gesso. In the course of an hour's walk through the town I did not see a dozen men in the prime of life.

I came upon a small piazza in front of the ruined walls of a deserted church. From the parapet one looked across a valley with precipitous sides, whose mazy windings were marked by the gray line of a waterless river-bed. Crowning the hill on the far side as one looked toward the snow-streaked, cloud-wreathed summit of Etna was a village apparently of the same size and population as Gesso. Within a few years this village, Serro by name, had also lost two-thirds of its population, declared my volunteer guide, a man who had been a barber in Philadelphia, and therefore could speak a little English. Its able-bodied men, also, had gone to America. As one looked upon

rear room, occupied by cheap furniture. The nature and arrangement of the furniture reminded one of a lodge-room in a small American town. On the tables were inkstands and trays of gray sand for blotting the writings of those who

used the tables. Apparently the room. was the village Council Chamber. Villagers gathered about the door. A short, slender man with long, narrow head, high forehead, bulging eyes, and long, tapering fingers, and wearing rusty, loose-fitting black clothes invited us to sit down. When he learned our mission, he began to talk. The baron, for

so he proved to be, spoke with his hands and lips in the fashion of a Southern

of the

Italian, which seems SO unnecessarily vehement to the Anglo-Saxon. His remarks were much more pleasing to sce than those average Southern Italian, for his words were cleanly cut, and his gesticulations, emphasized by his slender fingers, very precise.

"The people were very poor," said he, "when emigration began. Few went at first, but when the money began to come back, the numbers increased. Now no one is satisfied to stay at home. There are a thousand in America now, and remaining in the commune are perhaps eight thousand. Three hundred or

more go every year to America. They send back from 200,000 to 300,000 lire

I wondered if he were one of those of the landholding class who are having difficulty in securing labor for their estates and are obliged to pay more than the former eighteen or twenty cents a day for it.

On the following day we set forth in the automobile from Reggio. Rounding a jutting point of rock about twenty miles from that city, we came upon a scene described by "'Omer, when 'e smote 'is bloomin' lyre"-a strand extending to where "fell Scylla rises," and the rock itself. Its summit shrouded “in brooding tempests and in rolling clouds," we did not fear Scylla's bellowing from "the dire abodes," but swept along towards the castle-crowned rock and Scilla, the town, which stretches along the strand and climbs the hillside to the cathedral in the shadow of the castle, with perfect confidence in the efficiency with which the fane was holding down the lid over this fabled entrance to Hades. Scilla, too, we learned by conversation with the inhabitants who gathered as soon as we stopped on the hill, was one of the towns from "whence they come." Nearly a fifth of the former population of less than ten thousand had gone to the land across the Atlantic.

By the time we had become accustomed to looking upon impending death from collisions with flocks of sheep and goats and herds of pigs and giant Calabrian oxen as we coasted around the curves into them, we reached Bagnara. This town, perhaps twenty-five miles from Reggio, lies stretched out in irregular fashion on the side of a precipitous hill overlooking the sea. The crest of the hill was swathed in clouds. Innumerable barefooted women, girls, and children swarmed along the streets, but of middle-aged men there were comparatively few. Authors of guide-books Authors of guide-books

credit Bagnara with being celebrated for the beauty of its women. Evidently they based their knowledge on one another's works. Perhaps in the days when the first of these guide-book writers gave Bagnara this reputation it was true; but one's impression to-day is that the beauty has all been turned into physical strength. There were women and girls carrying all manner of burdens upon their heads, even logs and building material. Filling the rôle of hod-carrier, they took mortar to the tops of new houses. One rather slender girl, whose father was in America, was pointed out as having a capacity of two hundred kilograms, or nearly four hundred and fifty pounds. She and many of the other women knitted as they walked, presenting a curious contrast of masculine and feminine toil.

Walking down the main street while some repairs were being made to the automobile, we passed a church in which a funeral service was being held with much pomp. Stretching in front of the edifice, and overlooking the blue waters of the Mediterranean breaking on the rocky shore below, was a handsome piazza. This, we were informed, had been constructed with money earned in America. Thus was America helping to beautify the world.

"Bagnara," said a sub-agent of a steamship line, as we stood in a room of the albergo, "has lost one-quarter of her people. Four thousand have gone to Buenos Aires and North America."

Wherever we went we found some one who had relatives in America or who had been there. We stopped at Battiro, and a man beside the road who had returned home after living several years in Buenos Aires said that four hundred of its former population of fourteen hundred were in North and South America. From Monteleone, which stands on the site of the ancient Greek city of Hippo, five hundred had gone to both Americas, and three times as many from the surrounding country. At the mountain town of Tiriolo a group of men gathered around the machine, while comely women in the most picturesque costumes to be found in Calabria stood off a few paces and watched the proceedings about the curious vehicle. Tiriolo, occupying an

said that he had been a barber in Pittsburgh, but had come home to do military service. He added that he preferred America to Italy, and might go back again.

Beyond the old city of Cosenza we crossed the Busento River, in whose bed in the neighborhood Alaric, King of the Goths, was buried, and climbed up the steep side of a hill crowned by the ancient town of Tarsia. Our slow progress up the zigzag road was watched by the inhabitants of the town, who looked down at us from their balconies as from battlements, and who could be seen passing along the news of our approach,

places, people who had been in the New World or who had relatives there. On the way up to Gallina from Reggio I saw a young Calabrian cutting wheat in a neighboring field with a hand sickle of a design used by the Egyptians at the time the Israelites were marching out of that opulent land. I had been wishing to secure a photograph showing the primitive methods in use in the fields of southern Italy and Sicily, where until recently labor has been so cheap that the proprietors have not deemed it worth while to spend money for labor-saving machinery. So I picked up my camera