[3] The extreme misery of the paupers in Sicily, who form, he tells us, a tenth part of the population, quite haunts the imagination of M. Dumas.  He recurs to it several times.  At one place he witnesses the distribution, at the door of a convent, of soup to these poor wretches, and gives a terrible description of the famine-stricken group.  “All these creatures,” he continues, “had eaten nothing since yesterday evening.  They had come there to receive their porringer of soup, as they had come to-day, as they would come to-morrow.  This was all their nourishment for twenty-four hours, unless some of them might obtain a few grani from their fellow-citizens, or the compassion of strangers; but this is very rare, as the Syracusans are familiarized with the spectacle, and few strangers visit Syracuse.  When the distributor of this blessed soup appeared, there were unheard-of cries, and each one rushed forward with his wooden bowl in his hand.  Only there were some too feeble to exclaim, or to run, and who dragged themselves forward, groaning, upon their hands and knees.  There was in the midst of all, a child clothed, not in anything that could be called a shirt, but a kind of spider’s web, with a thousand holes, who had no wooden bowl, and who wept with hunger.  It stretched out its poor little meagre hands, and joined them together, to supply as well as it could, by this natural receptacle, the absent bowl.  The cook poured in a spoonful of the soup.  The soup was boiling, and burned the child’s hand.  It uttered a cry of pain, and was compelled to open its fingers, and the soup fell upon the pavement.  The child threw itself on all fours, and began to eat in the manner of a dog.”—­Vol. iii. p. 58.

And in another place he says, “Alas, this cry of hunger! it is the eternal cry of Sicily; I have heard nothing else for three months.  There are miserable wretches, whose hunger has never been appeased, from the day when, lying in their cradle, they began to draw the milk from their exhausted mothers, to the last hour when, stretched on their bed of death, they have expired endeavouring to swallow the sacred host which the priest had laid upon their lips.  Horrible to think of! there are human beings to whom, to have eaten once sufficiently, would be a remembrance for all their lives to come.”—­Vol. iv. p. 108.

Seeing there was no chance of bringing the doctor to the hotel, unless he carried him there by main force, Mr Dumas contented himself with relating the symptoms of his friend.  To drink lemonade—­much lemonade—­all the lemonade he could swallow, was the only prescription that the physician gave.  And the simple remedy seems to have sufficed; for the patient shortly after recovered.