. His friends went to the
station to meet him. He talked politics to them and asked their opinion
about the rotation of crops.

"And Michele?" they inquired.

"Oh! Michele," here he began to laugh: "Michele; yes, he is buried under
the ruins of a house three storeys high."

They could get nothing more out of him except laughter and that Michele
was lying under a house three storeys high. A few months later,
Michele's body was found, with no traces of decay, brought to
Caltanissetta and buried. Then his friends wrote elegies in verse about
him and handed them round for approval.

Plenty of people went mad besides Michele's father. The streets of
Messina were full of mad people. They told me of one who lost his wife.
Within a fortnight he married a widow whose husband had been destroyed.
This happy couple spent their honeymoon in digging out the bodies of
their previous spouses and having them suitably buried.

When I say they married, a widow may not legally marry for ten months
after the death of her husband, but this couple married on credit, as
they call it. There were many fugitives who found a temporary asylum in
a prison in Catania and who similarly married on credit, intending to
return later and contribute to the population of the new Messina.

There was a family living on the top floor of a house close to the
railway station near the port in Reggio. They were not hurt, but they
could not get down because the earthquake had destroyed the stairs. The
man made a rope of sheets, with the help of which he carried his wife
down, then he went up and fetched his children one after another, three
or four children. He went up again to fetch his money and while in his
room the house fell with him, killing and burying him in the ruins. But
he had saved his wife and children.

They told me of a victim, pinned down in a cellar, unable to rise; a
chicken, whose coop had been broken, escaped and passed near; the victim
caught the chicken, killed it, plucked it and ate it raw. They told me
of others, not pinned down but imprisoned in rooms, who ate what they
found in cupboards--oil, biscuits, salame, uncooked maccaroni. These
victims were saved and lived to recount their sufferings. But there were
others, pinned down and imprisoned, whose bodies were not extricated till
they had lain for weeks and months beside their emptied cupboards, no
longer on the watch for escaping chickens. I was in Catania about a y