iners, and the boys begin work outside the mine at twelve and inside at
fifteen. There has been an alteration in the law; formerly they began
younger and were deprived of the little education for which they now have
time, and the hard work so deformed their tender bodies that they could
not pass the army test. This is their modulation to the dominant, their
awakening to life. It is not a pleasing prospect; nor is the early
autumn of ill-health and decrepitude to which it naturally leads any more
pleasing. They pass their lives in the dark, morally and physically, and
frequently a sudden fall of rock cripples, if it does not destroy, the
victim; then there are broken pieces of a different kind to be taken
along the low dark galleries and brought up to the light.

I was in Caltanissetta one Saturday evening and saw the funeral of two
who had been killed in this way that morning. First came a band playing
a funeral march, that was all the more melancholy because the instruments
were distressingly discordant, as though in their grief the men had not
had time to tune them. Then came comrades carrying candles, and comrades
bearing first one coffin, then the second, plain wooden coffins with no
pall. Others carried chairs on which the coffins were rested when the
bearers were changed. There were no priests. But there were priests the
next day for the wedding of another comrade. Beppe told me that about 90
per cent of their funerals are conducted without priests and about 90 per
cent of their weddings are conducted with priests.

They told me of one sulphur-miner who, having seen enough funerals, left
the mine and went to Palermo in search of work. He was taken on by a
contractor who was levelling a piece of high ground, on which blocks of
dwellings have since been erected behind the Teatro Massimo, and began
work at six o'clock one morning. Five minutes later he was killed and
buried by a fall of earth.

In the mine they are in constant fear of this death. They work very hard
and the air is bad; they come up to sleep, to eat and to gamble. The air
they sleep in cannot be much better than that in the mine, for they are
laid out in close huts on shelves, like rolls of stuff in a draper's
shop. They hardly know the difference between youth and age, between
spring and autumn. They scarcely get a glimpse of the landscape except
on Saturdays and Sundays, and then they are intent upon something else.
After their week