They went there at once, but it was already late at
night and the place was shut. Unable to think of eating or sleeping they
walked about the streets till six in the morning, when they returned and
were admitted. They stated their business, inquired for the children,
produced photographs and, after a little delay, Turiddu and Gennaro came
running to them naked. It took some days of red tape, including a legal
act whereby Corrado constituted himself their second father, before they
were allowed to remove the boys. At last on the 11th January they took
possession of them and dressed them in the street with clothes they had
bought. Corrado had telegraphed to his wife and to the other relations,
and they left Naples and rejoined the company at Udine, where they
arrived on the 14th. One of the actors when he saw the children fainted
and Corrado was ill for days with a fever.

Turiddu wrote to me from Naples to tell me he was saved, and by August,
1909, when I went to Sicily again, he had left Giovanni and the company
and returned to Naples, where I found him and Gennaro with the professor
and his family, living in two rooms of an establishment where emigrants
are put to wait for their ships to take them to America. They told me
their experiences. In Messina the family had consisted of the professor,
his wife, his niece (a studentessa), Turiddu and Gennaro with two of
their school-fellows, one named Peppino, son of a well-to-do dealer in
iron bedsteads, and another named Luigi, son of a well-to-do
orange-merchant, who had gone to visit his uncle for Christmas. There
was also a servant girl who had gone that night to stay with her people.
The parents of Peppino and Luigi were both killed in their houses;
fortunately for Peppino he had not gone home or he would probably have
been killed. Luigi also escaped because the house of his uncle did not
fall or, if it fell, it did not kill him. The servant, who had gone
home, was killed.

They puzzled me by their attempts to explain why the professor's side of
the courtyard did not fall. It seems it was partly because, being near
the torrent, it had been built more strongly than the other three sides;
that was not all, there was also something about a Japanese gentleman who
had studied earthquakes at home and who had hurried to Messina, visited
the spot and declared that the direction of the shock was from (say) east
to west, had it been from west to east the side near the