It was a rare morning when we got out of our ill-smelling second-class compartment at Reggio di Calabrie, and strolled down in the bright sunlight to the steamer lying at the makeshift dock ready to ferry passengers over to Messina.
We were bound at last for the mountain village of Gualtieri-Sicamino, where lived Antonio Squadrito’s family, and as we contemplated the island across the straits it seemed that they must live in a very Elysium indeed.
A cool wind swept down from the north, barely ruffling the wonderfully colored water of the six-mile-wide channel; English colliers were ploughing up “light” from the south; scores of boats fishing for sardines were in sight; directly opposite was Messina, with its sickle-shaped arm that protects its harbor; and against the abrupt purple hills the creamy white houses of the town piled themselves up for more than a hundred feet in places. In the grand distance to the south lay the huge shape of Mount ?tna, the crater appearing like a bite out of the skyline.
As the steamer neared the shore, we could see that to the south of the city extended miles of fruit orchards very thickly set, and to the north an excellent road ran out to the Point of Faro, where rose the light that marks the entrance to the Straits of Messina.
As we entered the harbor, steaming in close by the 84forts, and so near to the water-front street that we could read the shop signs, we were interested to observe a large steamer lying at anchor taking on emigrants, who were being brought from the quay in rowboat loads. We could see a large group in and about the offices of the La Veloce Line, and everywhere along the water front great posters announcing the departures of emigrant ships, for the United States for the most part, though some were for Australia and some for South America. Those for Australia were the ships that sail from Brindisi and have their principal patronage from the Adriatic coast villages.
The posters were the same, and the general character of emigrant-departure bustle the same, that we had seen in the Boot, but over Messina there seemed to be a spell of greater prosperity and activity than over any of the other southern Italian towns. The streets were strikingly clean. The people walked almost as rapidly as Americans. The pretentiousness of Naples and Rome was missing. Business houses seemed to be built and used for business houses only. On the water front three American emblems were visible,—one over the door of the consulate where I knew Mr. Charles M. Caughey of Baltimore to preside, and the other two over wide-open doors decorated with huge white signs “American Bar.”
I learned later that the two wine-shops where they really can set out a good dry cocktail and a standard gin rickey are owned, one by a father and the other by his son. The father emigrated to New York about the time of the Civil War, and according to reports boasts of having jumped the bounty three times, and amassed a fortune in the saloon business in New York. The son is also keeping bar, because it is the only 85thing he knows how to do, and is waiting for his father to die, when I fancy there will be one less American flag on the water front of Messina. Both father and son are American citizens, and are much in demand with the emigrants; and from all I could gather they and their operations could be very well dispensed with.
We stopped in Messina only long enough to get fed, freshened, and in some small degree rehabilitated, and then took train for Gualtieri-Sicamino, intending to use that place as a base of observations in Sicily.
Having heard from Italians of the north that the people of southern Italy were for the most part low-browed swine, and having found the people in the Boot to be decent, kind-hearted and hard-working, though ignorant and poor, we were prepared to doubt the Sicilians to be the bloodthirsty, stiletto-using banditti, such as they are popularly supposed to typify. It was a real gratification to find the first representatives we met to be of a thoroughly desirable type considered from the standpoint of good raw material for a great growing nation.
Nor did we have occasion thereafter to change our first estimates.
As our train roared through the tunnels and toiled around the bold faces of the mountains the greater portion of that mid-afternoon, we were talking anxiously of what Gualtieri must be like, for it was set down in the books as a town of 5,000 people, and we feared that it would be much too large a community to yield the typical country family such as we had found made up the great mass of Italian emigrants. Soon we left the heights and the narrow defiles, and came down to the sea in plain view of the island volcano 86Stromboli, belching great volumes of vapor into the azure dome, and finally pulled up at Santa Lucia, bracketed in the time-table as the station of the town of Gualtieri. When we stepped out of the compartment the only building near at hand was the square, squat, stuccoed station, while a few houses straggled away in the distance. We were for climbing aboard again, but the guards were calling “Santa Lucia-Gualtieri-Sicamino, Pagia, San Filippo,” and even as we hesitated the capo blew his horn and the train crawled away towards Milazzo, in view on the far blue cape, and left us standing there.
To the north was the blue-green sea close at hand, to the east and west the bold knees of the mountains coming out to the water line, to the south the hills piled one on another, broken by twisting valleys. In the late afternoon sunlight, falling athwart the inland slopes, I could see how they were terraced like gardens in order to allow them to be cultivated and the terraces ran up to great heights. Certainly there was nothing about us to make us think we had come to a too city-like community for our experiment. Many, many miles away on heights we could see some white houses in clustering villages, but if there was a town of five thousand people lying about somewhere it was rather artfully concealed.
As I surrendered our tickets to the capo di stazione I said:—
“Is this the station for Gualtieri-Sicamino?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, where is the town?”
“You go along this road.”
He pointed to a narrow wagon road running along the tracks for a short distance, then winding into the 87heart of the hills. It was two inches deep with dust, and the sun beat down on it with great fervor. In addition to our being encumbered with the heavy camera, and one carefully packed valise, I realized that it was about 110° Fahrenheit on that bit of the king’s highway.
“How far is it to the town?”
“Eleven kilometers, sir.” (Seven miles and more!)
“I—I—suppose I can hire a carriage hereabouts,” I said,—a little faintly, I fear.
“No, there is no cart around here now.”
“How about a donkey or two?”
The station-master swept the surrounding country with hand-shaded eyes and shook his head deprecatingly.
“No, all that I can see are carrying loads of grapes.”
Seven miles’ tramp in that dust and sun with our luggage, which contained photographic things too precious to leave out of our sight!
Half a mile from the station we passed three women going along in a sort of dog-trot with great baskets of figs, just picked, on their heads, a rolled-up bit of cloth between head and basket.
“I think I have the point of view of those women,” said my wife’s voice from the pillar of dust that surrounded and hid her as the salt did Mrs. Lot.
In a short time a farmer who had been on our train overtook us. He was carrying a heavy sack of things the neighbors had commissioned him to buy in Messina, and in one hand he bore two salt cod, still dripping with brine. Later I learned that salt fish are a delicacy in Sicily and that the south of Europe is one of the best markets for Gloucester fishermen. My imperfect Italian caught his ear at once, and when he 88learned that my native tongue was English he demanded eagerly whether I had been in America or not; and when I answered in the affirmative he said I must excuse him, but were we not the friends that rich young Antonio Squadrito was expecting? Reluctantly enough I said we were, for my parting words with young Squadrito on leaving the Lahn were that he should keep our coming quiet and say nothing as to our nationality. There was very little now in our appearance or conduct to show we were Americans, and all through our travels we took refuge in the wide disparity of North of Italy dialects from the Sicilian, and those persons who did not think us Milanese or Turinese knew we must be French or Spanish—except in Gualtieri. There Antonio had let the cat out of the bag. As a result the whole town had been in a state of exalted expectancy for weeks. The people had a carreta, one of the open, springless mule carts, trimmed and decorated ready to be sent to meet us, and in fact our arrival was to be a public festival, but there was one slip—I had not sent Antonio a letter or telegram, and so we plodded on in the dust unmet and unwelcomed.
The farmer announced himself as our friend and said he would guide us straight to the Squadrito house, for he had a cousin in America, close to New York,—in Cincinnati in fact,—and, with the blessing of the Holy Mother, if his wife ever got well enough, he was going there too, taking her and the family.
We might have been a traveling circus or an army with banners. Of every five people we met, two at least turned to escort us back to the town, while the news of our arrival was shouted to the inmates of every house we passed and to the hundreds of men, 89women and children who were toiling in the fields. We overtook a flock of sheep being driven two miles to water, and soon we formed the van of the most picturesque cavalcade imaginable—men, women, sheep, babies, donkeys and goats. At a distance the country looked sparsely settled. Close at hand we found that it veritably swarmed with life, for the average population is 2,500 souls to the square mile.
The hills shut out the sun; a cool breeze sprang up; the boys gathered fresh figs for us from the wayside trees, grapes from vineyards as we passed, blackberries from bush-grown stone-heaps, apples, pears, plums and Ficus indicus, the thorn-covered, mango-shaped golden-yellow fruit which grows on the edge of the thick leaves of the cactus hedges of Sicily, and forms a very important and staple article of food with the poor. There is a Sicilian proverb which says: “No matter how dire the misfortune, there are fico-d’indias.”
Finally, as we turned a sharp corner in the road, we beheld the town, lit by the last rays of the sun filtering through a defile in the hills; and, weary, hot and dusty as we were, something akin to relief and soothing satisfaction stole over us as we saw that it and the country about was typical of all we had seen in the other provinces of southern Italy.
Gualtieri-Sicamino is a mass of stone-built, plaster-covered houses with a uniformity of architecture which hardly allows one to distinguish public buildings, stores or churches from private houses, and the whole is piled up against the face of a lofty hill. Nearly all villages in southern Italy are on the hilltops or the hill slopes, so that, as a Roman wrote nearly two thousand years ago, “the land that can be cultivated with ease 90should not be cumbered with habitations.” The general plan was identical with that of dozens of other villages we had visited: a street or two circling the base of the hill, one or two tiny squares, bare as new-laid eggs, then a succession of zigzag ways towards the top of the hill: ways,—they are not streets, because in some places they are not more than three feet wide, and one third of the way the ascent is so sharp that stone steps are used. The village is much as it was eight hundred years ago. Below its edge is the 200–foot ribbon of sand and shale, strongly walled in along its whole length from the sea to the heart of the mountains, the then dry torrente, or river bed.
Below us lay Gualtieri, with its white walls and dark tiled roofs, a rose-haze over it from the sinking sun, embowered in the clustering hills dark green with vineyards, olive and lemon orchards, the white belt of the torrente below and radiating ribbon footpaths along which came pannier-laden donkeys; little flocks of milk-goats; stoop-shouldered men bearing their long-bladed hoes and spear-shaped spades; erect women with brilliant-colored skirts, scarfs or kerchiefs, water-jars, baskets, panniers or bundles on their heads.
Our little procession wound down to the bridge, which looked almost Syracusan, it is so old, and across into the “square,” on one side of which is the principal church, and on the other the municipal offices. The description sounds well enough; but the church is a low, squat building with a small tower in which reposes a cracked bell and a noisy clock, while the “municipal offices” are two rooms on the second floor of a merchant’s combined store and home; the square is possibly sixty by one hundred feet, the largest open space in the community. In all the town there is not a street over twelve feet broad, and some would measure four or three. As we wound out of the square into one of these narrow ways and heard voices proclaiming on every hand that “Antonio’s Americans” had arrived, all fears that Gualtieri was too urban, and not a true type of the rural districts which send the emigrants, forever vanished from our minds.
The Messenger—The Guide—The House of the Squadritos—The Town (Gualtieri)
91Suddenly, in the narrowest part of the way in which we were, I saw over the door of a small hole-like room in the wall:
BOTTEGA
DI
NICOLA SQUADRITO,
and, seeing two boys at work with a small anvil and hand-drill, knew that this was the blacksmith shop of Antonio’s younger brother. Two doors beyond, a kindly old face appeared at the door an instant, our procession set up a shout, and something told me this was Antonio’s mother. We were ushered into a large, cool, windowless room with a red-tiled floor and bare, white walls, along which were rows and rows of hand-made rush-bottomed chairs. There must have been forty of them, and it seemed to augur well for the size of the family; but we learned later that the chairs stood there ready for the throng of neighbors who came nightly to hear Antonio tell of the marvels of America and to laugh over his prodigious yarns of buildings twenty stories high. Nightly they would shake their heads and laugh, and then Antonio would say: “Just wait till my American friends come, and you can ask them.”
Poor Mrs. Squadrito was almost beside herself. 92Our sudden descent upon her, the absence of all other members of the family in the vineyard east of town, the highly excited crowd which was pushing its way into the doors behind us, were too much for her, and she hastened to show us into an upper room—Antonio’s room, we could see at a glance—and to bar out the crowd.
In ten seconds she had brought a flask of fine old Marsala, in thirty more a plate of sugared cakes, in fifty a heaping basket of several sorts of grapes, fresh figs, pears, apples, etc., and it was with difficulty she could be restrained from bringing more. Swift-footed small boys had sped to bring Antonio and others of the family. Their number is so large that, unless the individuals are properly identified the reader may get them confused. At this point in the narrative Antonio and his father, being home on a visit, are to be subtracted from the portion in America. Giuseppe, twenty-nine years of age, Carlino, twenty-two, and Tomasino, fourteen, are in charge of the barber shop in Stonington. The total is father and mother, ten children, one daughter-in-law and one grandchild; and the nine in Italy, besides Antonio and his father, are as follows:
Giovanina, the oldest daughter, is twenty-eight, and a lovable girl. For some years she was rather frail, and her marriage with her soldier lover was deferred. He decided to stay in the army for another term, and he has been in the service fourteen years. In one year more he is to be discharged with a life pension, and Giovanina thinks that then the long, romantic dream of her life will come true. I have often looked at her face, sweet by reason of the soul that shines through its mask of flesh already beginning to fade, and have 93wondered if there was not a great disappointment awaiting her at the crest of the hill.
Next in the family comes Maria, a bright-eyed girl of twenty-three, wild with eagerness to go to America.
Carlino, I have said, is already in America, and next younger than he is Nicola, the blacksmith, with a shop in which he does really wonderful things with his hands. One day, for instance, he made a trunk lock with four tumblers, all parts from raw metal, which was truly a marvel of handicraft.
Vincenzo is a half-grown boy, merry, tuneful and irresponsible. Giovanni, Jr., and Tono are ten, eight and six years of age respectively, and are boys of the most thoroughly boyish type, only that they have early learned the great lesson of southern Italy that “he who eats must toil.”
The most interesting character of all is the mother, now fifty-four years of age, a woman of most kindly heart. Her hands are gnarled and knotted with toil. In her ears are heavy gold earrings with antique coral centres. Once they belonged to her grandmother, and some day they will descend to Caterina, her first granddaughter, the child of Giuseppe and his wife Camela. The wife, who is a plain, hearty woman, can scarcely wait for the day when she reaches New York. Tears of joy rise in her eyes at the very mention of her husband’s name. Little Caterina, or Ina, is but five, and is the pet of all.
But here the family and half the neighborhood come trooping up the stairs, escorting Antonio, who, since his arrival, had been treated like a king, and now he welcomed us royally and we were dragged into a perfect maelstrom of introductions to cousins and friends, 94to emerge a trifle confused as to relationships and names.
When we had removed some of the grime of our tramp and displayed the mysteries of our kodak to the throng, which could not contain its impatience concerning the black box and rolls of films, we were taken on a twilight walk in the little plot of vineyard ground which Antonio had bought three years before, east of the town.
The ostensible object of the walk was to show the town to us, but the real one, as we soon understood, was to show us to the town. My wife walked with Antonio and his father; Carmelo Merlino, the shoemaker and steamship agent, took my arm, and the people who could crowd into the narrow street, formed a procession behind us.
From that time on we lived in procession. Whatever we did, big or little, was done in procession. Did I desire to take a photograph of the town in the late afternoon from the hill opposite, five hundred inhabitants came to my help. If my wife went to the public laundry with the women, you would have thought the festival of the patron saint of laundries was in celebration. Did I go forth to the fields with the men at dawn, there was a centurion’s host to witness.
On our return from the garden it was after six o’clock, perhaps near seven, and we found many people waiting to see us, and in the next half hour the neighborhood called. Family after family poured in, all dressed in Sunday attire, and as we sat in the large second-floor room of the Squadritos’ house the entire apartment was thronged to suffocation, while in the street outside there were people enough to fill a circus tent.
95We had had an abundance of fruit, but were not averse to a little dinner, yet none appeared to be forthcoming. Unsubstantial as it was to us, all that we had to say was meat and drink to the people. Rapt in excitement they stood listening to the stories of the land of their heart’s desire, and no thought of food disturbed them. At seven o’clock my wife had told all that could be told of dresses, manners and customs in America. At eight o’clock I concluded an impromptu lecture on the topic of American liberty; still no dinner. At nine o’clock my wife had answered the last of the questions on the cost of groceries, rent and clothes, but no one mentioned dinner. At 9:30 I had described with minuteness what factories and mills were like, and my wife was expressing her liking for Italian dishes. At ten (having lunched at eleven o’clock that morning) we both showed signs of faintness, but still talked on. At eleven all the children were asleep on the floor or in their mothers’ arms, my wife seemed dead of fatigue, and my own exhaustion was complete, when something broke the spell and Mrs. Squadrito suddenly threw up her hands with a pious ejaculation and darted up-stairs. In ten minutes we were seated at a most delightful supper, including a heaping dish of boiled snails. The whole family had forgotten in the excitement that neither they nor we had dined, but they certainly made up for the oversight.
In this house, as in most others, the top floor was used for the dining-room and kitchen. The kitchen was in one corner—a sort of low altar of stone and plaster, with a hollow in the centre for charcoal. As some American architects have learned, cooking done on the top floor neither scents up nor heats the house.
96We sat chatting about the table until the cracked bell in the tower of the church in the square struck one, then my wife and I sought the repose and comfort of the big, high-set bed of the guest-room.
It was a strange sound which awoke me. Paradoxically, it was something very familiar. Clear and sweet, very distinct in the air of the early morning, a boy’s voice high up in the terraced vineyards on the slope before the town was singing:
“Who was it called them down?
’Twas Mister Dooley, brave Mister Dooley,
The finest man this country ever knew;
Diplomatic,
Democratic,
Oh! Mister Dooley—ooley—ooh.”
Then there broke forth the chatter of men, women and children who were gathering grapes, and had stopped to listen to an American song. The boy had been in America two years, his father had contracted consumption working in the New York subway, and the family had returned that he might recover in the balmy air of Sicily. One day the boy told me that as soon as he was big enough (he is eight years old) he was going to run away and go to America, because he could make more money selling papers after school than he could working all day in the fields in Gualtieri, and here he “never had no time for no fun.”
The spirit of this incident is the spirit which to-day stirs all Italy, all Greece, all Syria, all Hungary and Roumania, and has spread deep into the hearts of the people of the whole of southern Europe. The eyes of the poor are turned with longing fancy to “New York.” That is the magic word everywhere. 97The sound of it brings light to a hundred million faces in those lands, and oddly enough not one out of a thousand but believes that to come to America it is necessary to come to New York.
When I opened the battened shutters that took the place of windows, there was a cool inrush of fragrant air, and looking down from the balcony I saw Nicola already at work at his anvil. Carmelo Merlino was at his shoemaker’s bench set out before the door, and across the way the Di Bianca girls were giving the fat baby a bath in a large yellow bowl. The baby was splashing the water with great delight. All was peace and industry. We had begun our first full day in Gualtieri life.
People are up betimes in Italy. The very early morning hours are best for work, and a couple of hours’ labor is often accomplished before breakfast. An ordinary breakfast is vegetable stew, bread and fruit,—in summer fresh fruit, in winter dried. In fruit-ripening season, on every house-top and balcony, figs are drying, raisins and prunes are in the making, and prematurely plucked fico-d’indias are being made ready for winter use. Canned fruit is little used. A mash of tomatoes to use in winter with spaghetti is always drying at door or on house-top in sunshine.
The midday meal is eaten usually about 11:30, and is much the same, only less is eaten in the summer, and perhaps, though only once or twice a week, some meat, eggs or fowl are made to take the place of the vegetable stew. In the evening soup is served, made with some one of the thousand sorts of spaghetti and macaroni, as I will call it, though that word covers only a part of the great Italian dish, pasta. A meat stew may be added and more fruit and wine. I have seen 98poor families dine heartily off black bread, fried pumpkin and fico-d’indias, and in homes of more pretension I have eaten very good course dinners.
The men, women and children work in the fields, vineyards and orchards, transport products to market on mule-back, in donkey carts or on platform carts drawn by great white or gray, long-horned oxen. A team of the latter is a beautiful sight. The women not in the fields, in addition to household work, carry heavy jars of water on their heads; wash clothes in the public lavacro; pick grapes, olives, fruits, almonds, walnuts; cut, mangle and clean hemp; gather, flail out, and clean peas, beans, etc.; and bear children. The duty of maternity is the first thought of the Italian woman. Fecundity is the prime marital virtue and her principal hold on her husband’s esteem.
There are many labors which are shared by men, women and children, such as herding the goats, treading the grapes in the winepress, vegetable-gathering and attending to the irrigation. This latter is very important. The loads which men and women can carry on their heads are huge. I have seen a man coming in at the finish of a five-mile trot with 120 pounds of grapes on his head, and all the way he has maintained a gait very similar to that of a dog. Very early in life the children are taught to carry loads on their heads.
The morning of the second day, people began to come to us for advice and information. There were two or three old men in Gualtieri,—old beyond the ability for anything but very light labor. They wanted to send their sons to America that the boys might get a foothold and then bring them. They all asked me what was the best work for a young man to do in my country. All were farmers living in the village, who went out each day to work the little patches of ground they called farms.
Part of the Family Gathered in the Kitchen (From left to right: Ina, Tono, Giovanina, Antonio, Mrs. Squadrito, Giovanni, Jr., Nicola, Maria)—Felicia Pulejo—Concetta
99These holdings were almost invariably owned by some one else, a few by well-to-do people in the village, most of them by the Duke of Avarna, who lives in Naples and never comes near Sicily, though he owns nearly all the ground around Gualtieri. The actual farmers tilled the soil, bought or preserved the seed, supplied the implements, looked after the construction and maintenance of the irrigation, harvested the crop and often marketed it, then gave the landowner’s agent, the middleman at Faro near by, half of all they produced. Of what they had left, three per cent went for direct or indirect taxes, and they gave “voluntarily” to the church one tenth. A little calculation will show one that even if a farmer have a prosperous season and be not in debt or have any misfortunes, he retains, when he has finished his contributions to the support of the non-producing classes, aristocrats, tradesmen, army, church, and middlemen, but thirty-eight per cent of what he produces by toil from before dawn till after dark. When I say that ninety-four per cent of the production in southern Italy is agricultural, and that the one important source of wealth is the cultivation of the soil, and the control of wealth the ownership of the land, it can be understood how and why the poor farmer, having heard what betterment there is in the United States will borrow money at twenty per cent for six months to get himself or a son over here to establish a foothold from which he can broaden a space of relief and liberty. Many of these boys in Gualtieri, anxious to go, desired to escape the forcible conscription every two 100years, which takes every other able-bodied young man, and keeps one fifteenth of the able-bodied men of the country under arms at all times. The Italian government never relinquishes its claim on its men for military duty, and no matter whether they become American citizens or not, if they have not served their term and return to Italy, they are arrested and conscripted. A notable test case of this was that of the young man from Baltimore,—Schipriano, son of an Italian general,—in which the government won.
Even though the Squadritos have raised themselves to an independent footing in Gualtieri and own a little land, the power of the landlord was demonstrated fully to me when, on the second day of our stay, Giovanni Squadrito got out from among the things he had brought back from America a nice piece of oilcloth, a treasure in Italy, and tramped off to Faro and presented it to the middleman, the agent of the Duke of Avarna, as a sort of propitiatory offering. At the agent’s office there was a considerable staff of clerks and bailiffs, which showed me what a business is this collecting of the crops and rents.
One poor old woman toiled across the hills to see my wife to implore her to take her to America. She had a daughter who had gone there as a servant last year, and in the three months previous to the old woman’s first visit to us she had had no letter or word of news. She was nearly frantic and wished to go in search of the girl. In the time we were in Gualtieri before our party started for New York, no tidings came. My wife was forced to tell her that she could never go to America, the age limit and the public-charge law would stop her at Ellis Island and send her back.
101It was not unusual for a whole family from far over the hills to arrive late some afternoon to pay their respects, and before they had been seated long a certain uneasiness on the part of the women culminated in the oldest man of the party producing from inside his shirt a strip of paper, much thumbed, torn and pasted. In faded ink it bore the names and addresses of a son, a brother, father, perhaps daughter across the ocean. Though they knew my home to be New York, they were often disappointed because I could not give them news of the beloved relative in Bangor, Me.; Birmingham, Ala.; Brownsville, Tex.; in Chili, Brazil or Canada. One man had a button photograph of Francesco Zotti, who had formerly been my neighbor in New York. As it chanced I once shook hands with Zotti, and when I told his relatives this they actually cried for joy.
The people have no true conception of America, though Italy is flooded with books of views principally of New York and the Pan-American Exposition, and there is a brave effort made by the Italians in America to write home adequate descriptions of the new land. Once I was called upon to settle a most bitter and acrimonious dispute between two men as to what America was like. One, who had a brother in Wilkes-barre, Pa., thought it was all coal mines, steel mills and railroads, while the other, whose cousin worked in a New York barber shop, maintained that America was all high buildings and railroads which run over the house-tops. Each new letter caused the argument to break out afresh.
One woman, who had a husband working in a saloon in Pittsburg, was very effusive in her greeting and her conversation with us until, in answer to her question as to what kind of parrot we had, I replied:
102“Why, my dear madam, we have no parrot.”
I noticed a look of suspicion shoot across her face, and her manner became strangely reserved. I could see that from that moment she was extremely skeptical about anything we said. In a little while, when talking aside with some member of the family, she openly expressed her doubt that we were Americans or had ever been in America. This was laughingly repeated to me for a reassertion as to our nationality.
“What makes you think we are not Americans?” I asked the dubious visitor.
“Because you have no parrot.”
I do not hesitate to say I thought she must be demented, but in further explanation she produced a bunch of her husband’s letters to prove her statements, and, reading them through hastily, I found that there is a parrot in the saloon where he ’tends bar, and one across the street, and the things these two parrots do and say make up the burden of his letters home, so his wife was convinced that America is a land of parrots.
For days there was a constant succession of gaieties, and I was glad we were not compelled to eat and drink one tenth of what was set before us. We were loaded with messages from fathers, mothers, brothers, sweethearts, wives, children, and friends for those already in America.
The Mannino family, living across the torrente in the western section of the town, being relatives of the Squadritos, were foremost in trying to do the honors of the relationship and were much concerned that a young nephew go with us, but I saw at a glance that he had favus, and I told them he would be excluded. He was insistent and started for Naples to take a steamer of another line, having been assured that by 103the payment of one hundred francs to some persons at Naples he could be smuggled through. Soon a telegram came from Naples, saying the people who were going to smuggle him had robbed him of every cent. He asked for more money, it was sent him, and he sailed. I have so far failed to find any trace of him, but he did not return to Gualtieri and I believe he must have entered the United States through Canada, as this is a mode of ingress the United States is yet seeking to completely block. Of all the wealth of trickery and immigration fraud which I afterwards was able to lay my hands upon, this was the very first hint, and yet what would have been a fine specific case has escaped me.