This praise was borne out by all we saw and heard at Syracuse.
Miss Davis opened a hospital for the wounded; and work-rooms where all, who could sew, were employed to make clothes and bedding for the horde of almost naked refugees the Russian, English, German as well as the Italian ships brought to slumbrous Syracuse. She was one of the prime movers in the relief work at Syracuse, that the Duke of Genoa said was the best organized of all he saw. Each man was set to work at the thing he could do; the tailors made clothes, the cobblers made boots, the masons, carpenters and painters were employed to finish a large public building that stood half completed. So these poor people were enabled from the first to earn their own living, to escape the dreadful pauperization that in Rome, and almost everywhere else, confronted them. There remained the “poor things,” the men who had no skill, no trade; what work could be invented for them? Miss Davis was now entrusted with large sums of money, the spending of it was left to her judgment. From the first she maintained that among the able bodied, only those who worked could be fed. It would have been far easier to issue rations, or so much money a day to the profughi: those methods did not suit the “Angel of Mercy.” She looked about her, found the roads in a bad condition; organized and kept at work a road gang, mending the roads of Syracuse.
The tributes Miss Davis received are wonderfully touching. A poor organist from Messina composed a song in her honor, dedicated to the Tortorella (turtle dove); the Sindaco sent her a diploma of honor, beautifully engrossed with the coat-of-arms of the city; most precious of all is the address, signed by a long list of her profughi, addressed to the “Gentile Miss,” the sublime “Heroine of Charity,” who is saluted “in the name of the great heart of Ortygia, the center of the ancient world!”
“After Taormina, Girgenti is the most beautiful place in Sicily,” Patsy declared.
“Some people say Taormina is the most beautiful place on earth; if you like to measure—“
“I don’t—I couldn’t—so many places seem best! Wait till you see the temples though; there’s nothing to compare with them outside Athens.”
We had arrived at the port of Empedocles at sunset, and driven through the violet dusk up to the town, glowing like a jewelled city on the heights overlooking river and harbor. I had gone direct to the comfortable Hotel des Temples, a mile outside Girgente, where again as at Syracuse we were the only guests. When we met at breakfast, Patsy had already explored the place.
“We ought to have kept more time for this,” he said; “for us it’s even more interesting than Syracuse.”
“Girgenti—” I began.
“Call it Acragas, the Greek name, or at least Agrigentum, the Roman,” Patsy interrupted. “I’ve made friends with the custode of the Temple of Zeus; he’s like the others, a superior man—here in Sicily they all seem a cut above the same sort on the mainland.”