Note: Translator Pauline Bancroft Flach died in 1966, less than 70 years ago. Therefore, this work is protected by copyright, restricting your legal rights to reproduce it. However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now. Read more about copyright.
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130 THE MIRACLES OF AJVTICHRIST
grieved that life should be made so hard. She asked
why the people should be forced to bear such
enormous taxes. Why should the salt tax exist, so that
a poor woman could not go down to the shore and
get a pail of salt water, but must buy costly salt in
the government shops ? Why should there be a tax
on palm-trees? The peasants, with anger in their
hearts, were felling the old trees that had waved so
long over the noble isle. And why should a tax be
put on windows? What did they want? Was it
that the poor should take away their windows, move
out of their rooms, and live in cellars?
In the sulphur-mines there were strikes and
turbulence, and the government was sending troops to
force the people back to work. Donna Micaela
wondered if the government did not know that there
was no machinery in those mines. Perhaps it had
never heard that children dragged the ore up from
the deep shafts. It did not know that these children
were slaves; it could not imagine that parents had
sold them to overseers. Or if the government did
know it, why did it wish to help the mine-owners?
At one time she heard of a terrible number of
crimes. And she began again with her questions.
Why did they let the people become so criminal?
And why did they let them be so poor and so ragged ?
Why must they all be so ragged? She knew that
any one living in Palermo or Catania did not need to
ask. But he who lived in Diamante could not help
fearing and asking. Why did they let the people
be so poor that they died of hunger?
As yet the summer was hardly over; it was no
later in the autumn than the end of October, and
already Donna Micaela began to see the day when
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