pened it, and asked her to walk with me to
the park, and I would have killed her had not the police prevented me.
Wherefore, O giudici! I pray you to recall her and permit me to kill her
or to decree that she be hung!"

This case illustrates the depths of ignorance and superstition that
are occasionally to be found among Italian peasant immigrants. Another
actual experience may demonstrate the mediaeval treachery of which the
Sicilian Mafiuso is capable, and how little his manners or ideals have
progressed in the last five hundred years or so.

A photographer and his wife, both from Palermo, came to New York and
rented a comfortable home with which was connected a "studio." In the
course of time a young man--a Mafiuso from Palermo--was engaged as an
assistant, and promptly fell in love with the photographer's wife. She
was tired of her husband, and together they plotted the latter's murder.
After various plans had been considered and rejected, they determined on
poison, and the assistant procured enough cyanide of mercury to kill a
hundred photographers, and turned it over to his mistress to administer
to the victim in his "Marsala." But at the last moment her hand lost
its courage and she weakly sewed the poison up for future use inside the
ticking of the feather bolster on the marital bed.

This was not at all to the liking of her lover, who thereupon took
matters into his own hands, by hiring another Mafiuso to remove the
photographer with a knife-thrust through the heart. In order that the
assassin might have a favorable opportunity to effect his object, the
assistant, who posed as a devoted friend of his employer, invited the
couple to a Christmas festival at his own apartment. Here they all spent
an animated and friendly evening together, drinking toasts and singing
Christmas carols, and toward midnight the party broke up with mutual
protestations of regard. If the writer remembers accurately, the
evidence was that the two men embraced and kissed each other. After
a series of farewells the photographer started home. It was a clear
moonlight night with the streets covered with a glistening fall of snow.
The wife, singing a song, walked arm in arm with her husband until they
came to a corner where a jutting wall cast a deep shadow across the
sidewalk. At this point she stepped a little ahead of him, and at the
same moment the hired assassin slipped up behind the victim and drove
his knife into his back. The wife s