all this look. Turiddu has not got it, nor has my
porter's cousin. The professor is sixty-two, Turiddu is only twelve and
was able to sleep. My porter is about forty-two, his cousin is not yet
thirty. Again, the professor had the responsibility of his party;
Turiddu had none. My porter has lost his wife and child; his cousin is
unmarried.

These two porters told me a great deal that I had read in the papers in
England; to hear it from them on the spot made it more real, and
especially to see their gestures describing how the earthquake took the
houses and worried them as a terrier worries a rat. Few houses were not
wrecked. I pointed to one which I knew to be the Palazzo dei Carabinieri
at a corner of a street leading out of the station piazza, but my porter
replied:

"You are looking at a corner of it and can only see two walls. The other
walls and the floors have fallen. If the shutters were open you would
see the sky where the rooms ought to be."

At the other corner of the street used to stand the Albergo di Francia,
where I stayed once when all the other hotels were full because the wind
was so strong that the ferry-boat could not get out of the harbour to
take the travellers across the straits. The albergo was lying in a heap
on the ground; in its fall it had crushed and killed and buried the young
landlord, Michele;--"God rest his soul in heaven, so merry!"

I uttered some banality about their having passed through a terrible
time. They accepted my remark as a final summing up and said it was
better not to talk about it. It was evidently a relief to them to talk
of something else.

Before Messina can be rebuilt on its old site, the ruins must be cleared
away and the disputes about the boundaries must be settled, and this will
take time. Meanwhile the people are living in the wooden bungalows of a
New Messina which is growing up outside the old town. I spent two days
there in the spring of 1910 and again in 1911. The Viale San Martino is
the principal street. There are hotels, bookshops, sweet-shops,
tobacconists, jewellers, butchers, restaurants with tables ready spread,
and the lottery offices are open. Most of the huts have no upper storey
and some are no bigger than half a dozen sentry boxes knocked into one.
It is very dusty. The boys are crying papers up and down the street,
there are barbers' saloni and shops with silver-topped canes. The
earthquake seems to be forgotten in the inte