res more remarkable, yet there are some reasons
for their persistence in Sicily which apply with greater force than
to Great Britain. The explanation, through mere tradition, is that the
common usage of signs dates from the time of Dionysius, the tyrant of
Syracuse, who prohibited meetings and conversation among his subjects,
under the direst penalties, so that they adopted that expedient to
hold communication. It would be more useful to consider the peculiar
history of the island. The Sicanians being its aborigines it was
colonized by Greeks, who, as the Romans asserted, were still more apt
at gesture than themselves. This colonization was also by separate
bands of adventurers from several different states of Greece, so that
they started with dialects and did not unite in a common or national
organization, the separate cities and their territories being governed
by oligarchies or tyrants frequently at war with each other, until,
in the fifth century B.C., the Carthaginians began to contribute a new
admixture of language and blood, followed by Roman, Vandal, Gothic,
Herulian, Arab, and Norman subjugation. Thus some of the conditions
above suggested have existed in this case, but, whatever the
explanation, the accounts given by travelers of the extent to which
the language of signs has been used even during the present generation
are so marvelous as to deserve quotation. The one selected is from
the pen of Alexandre Dumas, who, it is to be hoped, did not carry his
genius for romance into a professedly sober account of travel:

"In the intervals of the acts of the opera I saw lively conversations
carried on between the orchestra and the boxes. Arami, in particular,
recognized a friend whom he had not seen for three years, and who
related to him, by means of his eyes and his hands, what, to judge by
the eager gestures of my companion, must have been matters of great
interest. The conversation ended, I asked him if I might know without
impropriety what was the intelligence which had seemed to interest
him so deeply. 'O, yes,' he replied, 'that person is one of my good
friends, who has been away from Palermo for three years, and he has
been telling me that he was married at Naples; then traveled with
his wife in Austria and in France; there his wife gave birth to a
daughter, whom he had the misfortune to lose; he arrived by steamboat
yesterday, but his wife had suffered so much from sea-sickness that
she kept her bed, and he