This case illustrates the depths of ignorance and superstition that are occasionally to be found among Italian peasant immigrants.  Another actual experience may demonstrate the mediaeval treachery of which the Sicilian Mafiuso is capable, and how little his manners or ideals have progressed in the last five hundred years or so.

A photographer and his wife, both from Palermo, came to New York and rented a comfortable home with which was connected a “studio.”  In the course of time a young man—­a Mafiuso from Palermo—­was engaged as an assistant, and promptly fell in love with the photographer’s wife.  She was tired of her husband, and together they plotted the latter’s murder.  After various plans had been considered and rejected, they determined on poison, and the assistant procured enough cyanide of mercury to kill a hundred photographers, and turned it over to his mistress to administer to the victim in his “Marsala.”  But at the last moment her hand lost its courage and she weakly sewed the poison up for future use inside the ticking of the feather bolster on the marital bed.

This was not at all to the liking of her lover, who thereupon took matters into his own hands, by hiring another Mafiuso to remove the photographer with a knife-thrust through the heart.  In order that the assassin might have a favorable opportunity to effect his object, the assistant, who posed as a devoted friend of his employer, invited the couple to a Christmas festival at his own apartment.  Here they all spent an animated and friendly evening together, drinking toasts and singing Christmas carols, and toward midnight the party broke up with mutual protestations of regard.  If the writer remembers accurately, the evidence was that the two men embraced and kissed each other.  After a series of farewells the photographer started home.  It was a clear moonlight night with the streets covered with a glistening fall of snow.  The wife, singing a song, walked arm in arm with her husband until they came to a corner where a jutting wall cast a deep shadow across the sidewalk.  At this point she stepped a little ahead of him, and at the same moment the hired assassin slipped up behind the victim and drove his knife into his back.  The wife shrieked.  The husband staggered and fell, and the “bravo” fled.

The police arrived, and so did an ambulance, which removed the hysterical wife and the transfixed victim to a hospital.  Luckily the ambulance surgeon did not remove the knife, and his failure to do so saved the life of the photographer, who in consequence practically lost no blood and whose cortex was skilfully hooked up by a dextrous surgeon.  In a month he was out.  In another the police had caught the would-be murderer and he was soon convicted and sentenced to State prison, under a contract with the assistant to be paid two hundred and fifty dollars for each year he had to serve.  Evidently the lover and his mistress concluded that the photographer bore a charmed life, for they made no further homicidal attempts.