At our hotel I made the acquaintance of a lady whose name I never learned. When I spoke of our Consul she told me what admirable service he had rendered.
“It was Mr. Bishop’s idea to set the profughi in the different ricoveri to work,” she said. “At first all the rest of the Committee were opposed to it. He tried first one, then another; at last he found a priest, an admirable man, who backed him. I don’t know what they would have done without him.”
How Griscom’s slogan “We help these people to help themselves!” rings out. I heard its echo in Palermo, Syracuse, Messina, wherever one of his staff has been.
Mr. Bishop spoke with the greatest cordiality of the Palermitan Committee. “They have done fine work,” he said. He mentioned the wife of General Mazza as one of the most earnest of the leaders.
There were still 7,000 profughi in Palermo at this time. I went with Canon Skeggs and Dr. Parlato to visit one of the largest ricoveri. It was admirably arranged in a big garden surrounded on three sides by an arcade like a wide cloister. This had been boarded in, and divided off into neat little dwellings where the refugees lived in families. They all had good beds and were fairly well clothed. The Canon had a word for every one.
To this man he promised employment, to that he gave news of a lost daughter separated from the rest of the family and traced to a ricovero in Syracuse. In one room I talked with an elderly woman and her unmarried daughter, a pretty creature who said she was thirteen and looked it; her mother claimed that she was sixteen. She was very calm looking, said she felt perfectly well, but that she was to go to the lying-in hospital the next day. Poor child, her lover was killed at Reggio.
I talked with an old woman who had lost every member of her family.
“Sono troppo impressionata!” she cried, “tremo sempre!”
She showed a tiny empty snuff-box.
“I have not a soldo to buy snuff!”