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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136 THE MIRACLES OF AJVTICHRIST
Every day graver news came to Diamante.
Everybody began to get out their weapons. And although
it was forbidden, they were carried secretly by
every one.
All travellers left the island, and in their place one
regiment after another was sent over from Italy.
The socialists talked and talked. They were
possessed by evil spirits; they could not rest until
they had brought on the disaster!
At last the ringleaders had decided on the day
on which the storm was to break loose. All Sicily,
all Italy, was to rise. It was no longer menace; it
was reality.
More and more troops came from the mainland.
Most of them were Neapolitans, who live in constant
feud with the Sicilians. And now the news came
that the island had been declared in a state of siege.
There were to be no more courts of justice; only
court-martials. And the people said that the
soldiers would be free to plunder and murder as they
pleased.
No one knew what was to happen. Terror seemed
to make every one mad. The peasants raised
ramparts in the hills. In Diamante men stood in great
groups on the market-place, stood there day after
day, without going to their work. There was
something terrible in those groups of men dressed
in dark cloaks and slouch hats. They were all
probably dreaming of the hour when they should
plunder the summer palace.
The nearer the day approached when the
insurrection was to break out, the sicker Don Ferrante
became; and Donna Micaela began to fear that he
would die.
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