Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/344

 316 never allow the publication of a collection he had made for scholars of the undesirable part of popular traditions as it exists in the folklore of his native island. For this volume, and for this alone, he was offered a good sum of money, but in vain.

In the end his people discovered that they had a great man among them, and when honours were heaped on him in the last few years of his life, they were as much delighted as if they had been done to each of them severally. Those fortunate individuals who, like myself, many years before, had him for guide to the inexhaustible points of interest at Palermo, felt as if they were driving about with a royal personage, so universal was the salutation that greeted him. He witnessed the creation of a Chair of Demo-Psychology (as he preferred to call folklore) at the University of Palermo, of which he was, of course, appointed the first Professor. Thus the Science of Popular Traditions received academical recognition for the first time. It was the consecration of Pitre's labours. His other great desire, the constitution of an Ethnological Museum, was realised not long before he died. As previously stated, he was made a Senator in 1915, and on his visit to Rome to take his seat, everyone fêted him. Unhappily, his last years were clouded by losses which, with his affectionate disposition, he never got over: his only son, a promising young doctor, died from blood-poisoning, and his younger daughter perished with her new-born infant only a year after her marriage, in the Messina earthquake. I remember her as a beautiful child when I first knew Pitrè at Palermo in 1888. The blow almost overpowered him; he shut himself up in the little room she had occupied as a young girl, and remained for months prostrate with grief. At last he had the idea of privately printing as a memorial to her a little collection of tender and sweet swallow legends made by herself. This touching booklet he sent to a few friends, and I think the preparation of it was what brought him back to his own work, which he pursued till the day of his death without resting, though never with the old joy.

It is greatly to be wished that his surviving daughter, Signora Maria d'Alia Pitrè, who inherits much of his literary gift, would write his life. No one could do it so well.

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