This missing link in Sicilian civilization means that everything in which baking-powder, or any substitute -- saleratus or what not -- is a constituent element, is absent from the Sicilian menu. And in addition to this, another frightful hole in the menu comes from the absence of milk. Milk is practically used only as food for infants and in the morning coffee, and only the well-to-do take the latter. And not a tenth of the population of Sicily ever tasted butter. Its place is taken by olive-oil.

The use of eggs is very slight compared to that in America. They averaged fifteen cents a dozen the year around where we were. We got them for twelve cents in the spring, large and warm from the nest. But there did not seem to be the nourishment in them that there is in American eggs, due, I think, to the less nourishing food fed the hens. And whites of these eggs would not beat "stiff" as they do in America. This may sound improbable, but it is true!

The large assortment of foods that come to Americans in packages is absent -- things like gelatins, corn-starch, canned meats, fruits and vegetables, the great American cracker in all its forms, and a hundred other things which lend variety to the American menu. And finally, to complete the list of holes in the Sicilian bill of fare, they use potatoes about as much as we do macaroni.

Meat costs as much or more than it does in the United States under the trust prices of the last few years, so one can imagine how much of it the Sicilians eat.

THEY eat soups and salads, all kinds of vegetables, fruit and fish, deliciously fresh and amazingly cheap. Spanish mackerel is six cents a pound I have known it to run to forty in New York lobster is eight cents, and all kinds of Mediterranean fish average four cents. Fish are on the table an hour or two after they come out of the water, and fruit and vegetables have been out of the ground about as long this in a city of sixty thousand inhabitants! If it storms so that it is unsafe for the local boats to go out, there is simply no fresh fish in the city. None comes from a distance.

A good deal of salt and pickled fish is used the only thing, so far as I could find, that Sicilians ever "put up." Preserved or canned fruit is unknown. Of course there is never a month in the year when there is not fresh fruit. There is seldom more than one fresh fruit and vegetable at a time, and everybody is eating exactly the same things at the same time.

When artichokes are ripe, everybody eats artichokes and no other vegetable. Then something else comes along. These artichokes, by the way, which cost as high as twenty-five cents apiece in New York, and which I never saw for less than twenty-five cents a pair, I have bought for a cent a dozen at the tag-end of the season at the villa. Lemons were three cents a dozen, oranges four and five cents. For two cents I have bought three cauliflowers which would cost fifteen cents apiece in New York; for six cents two most luscious muskmelons which would cost a dollar apiece on Manhattan.

I remember the first time I got those melons for that price. The man handed me down one from the wagon with the statement that it was six cents.

"No," said I, as I had heard my neighbors do, "you must give me two for six cents." I did it more to see if it would work than anything else, and when the poor fellow silently handed me out another without a word, I was horridly ashamed of myself. That is the way everybody markets in Sicily. Whatever price is asked they immediately demand that it be reduced just half.

Sicilians like both coffee and chocolate, but these are luxuries of the well-to-do. Tea as a beverage is unknown except among the cosmopolitan. It is bought by the teaspoonful at the druggist's.

But all these things, foods and beverages, are side issues beside the overwhelming importance of macaroni. I have never in my entire life seen any other mania comparable with that of the Sicilians for macaroni. The dinner is begun with a huge plate of the pasta in some form. After that there may be fish, meat, vegetables, entrčes, salad, dessert, but a very little of each suffices. The yawning cavity within has been filled by macaroni at three cents a pound.

On a wheat diet has the race evolved, and on a wheat diet it does its work to-day. Considering the Sicilian reputation in America for deeds of blood and violence, this is rather a facer for those enthusiasts who claim that a purely vegetable diet would eliminate all ferocity from mankind.

WHEN I saw the stove I was to cook with, I suffered another shock. It was a long stone bench, built solidly into the kitchen wall, and neatly covered with pretty tiles. In the top of this bench were three square holes, just large enough to set a pot or kettle over. These holes were lined with an iron grating about three inches deep. Into this is put a handful of charcoal. There is an opening underneath, and under this one lights a bit of paper and merrily fans with a palm-leaf fan till the charcoal ignites. Imagine cooking with a thing like that after a gas range!

However, like all institutions of the country, it is economical. No heat is dissipated - every caloric atom is applied to the Bottom of the cooking dish, which exactly covers the charcoal. These cooking dishes, until just a few years ago when granite and tin ware came in, were all of hand-beaten brass, made by local craftsmen; and on every kitchen wall still hangs a burnished spread of splendid coppers.

This stove is used throughout Italy. I have seen it in the Smartest kind of new, modern, marble-finished apartments in Genoa. It is the Latin stove; you find it in the West Indies and wherever Latin blood has dominated the civilization. And, moreover, it was the Roman stove. Exactly such stoves may be seen in the kitchens of Pompeii.

The bread is made of water, flour, and a piece of sour dough from The last baking to raise it. I suppose that sour dough is a Direct descendant of a piece of sour dough used under the Caesars! Sicily has never known a yeast-cake. This bread, which They call "pane di casa" -- "house bread," or home-made bread - is dark brown, sour, and, when cold, of a brick-like consistency. I suppose the mastication of it is what gives Sicilians their fine teeth.

There are huge stationary stone wash-tubs in the houses, and it gave me a peculiar sensation, when poking about the ruins of Selinunte, destroyed by the Carthaginians 409 B.C., to come upon a stone wash-tub exactly like those used by the poorer classes to-day.

Our cistern, too, at the villa was a huge red terra-cotta vase, Of the most classic shape, which stood up under the roof under the roof over the pantry. The only trouble with it was that the pump which was supposed to fill it from the reservoir under the porch never had pumped a single drop of water, and never would. We hauled water through a hole in the floor in a bucket on the End of a string!

THE well is the woman's club of the populace all over Sicily. There they exchange such ideas as they may possess, and we See what there is to see. In the more progressive hill towns of continental Italy women have lapsed at times into the shameful modernity of the five-gallon tin can of the Standard Oil Company as a water carrier. But we were a conservative people, and still used such jars as the ladies of the Odyssey used to carry about.

For those interested in prices and conditions of living in Sicily, I will say that the villa we rented was seventy feet long

The women at the well

and forty in width. It had two great stone-floored porches, a flower garden which the landlord's gardener kept in order, vineyard and henyard, and was surrounded by high stone walls which concealed all from the street. There were thirteen rooms, four of them very large, all on one floor, with very lofty ceilings. We rented this place, furnished, for thirteen dollars for three months; we could have taken it for a year for eighty dollars.

There was a charming view, which speedily became magnificent as one climbed the hill behind the house. There was no bath-tub. I don not believe there were half a dozen in the whole province, with a population of ninety thousand people!

There was no gas. The landlord supplied the instruments of illumination commonly used in Trapani. They were small glass lamps, with little old-fashioned, single wicks, and those tall, cylindrical, tiny, pipe-stem chimneys used in rural America some thirty years ago.

IT IS impossible to describe the utter change of this life; the entire rest for nerves rasped by work and overstrain. In five months we never even saw an English newspaper, and rarely an Italian one.

In the white city which gleamed fairylike at the edge of the sea there was not for sale one newspaper, one sheet of stationery, book, pen, or bottle of ink. There was but one place indeed where we could buy pins. The first time we asked the woman for pins, she said, "How many?" As we had never heard of buying less than a paper of pins, we said, with an inflection of surprise, "The paper." Then it was her turn to be surprised and somewhat disgusted. The paper comprised her entire stock of pins, and it inconvenienced her to let it go.

I shall not forget one day when we wished to take a train from Trapani. After breakfast it was discovered that of three timepieces in the house not one was going. At not a villa or a farmhouse within inquiring distance could we find a timepiece in action. We caught the train by guess, arriving at the station one hour too early.

When one of us wished to write a letter, the entire family was called into consultation to determine the day of the week. When by united cerebration we had decided that it was Wednesday, the question was, what Wednesday -- Wednesday the eighteenth, or Wednesday the twenty-fifth? So the lotus crept through our veins, and we stored up vitality for another bout with the nerve-racking civilization of New York.

This article originally appeared in the October 1912 issue of The Delineator, a monthly women's magazine.