Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/469

 graze, and are brought in every night and morning to be milked. We drove up-town in Palermo just as the milk goats were being collected by the herd boys. The goats know where they belong, and often climb two or three flights of stairs, to be milked. Milch cows are also driven into town, and milked in the streets. The calves accompany their mothers, and to insure that they will not get lost, are tied to their mother's tail. There is a certain brand of Italian cattle, and they have not changed since the days of the Romans; every section of the Old World has its particular kind of cattle. In South Africa we saw a good many queer-looking cattle from Madagascar, imported after the rinderpest had killed nearly everything in Africa. In Egypt we saw another kind. India has another variety, and the Scotch and Irish also have varieties of their own. In the United States we are constantly improving cattle, and have no favorite except the best Although we visited Palermo on Sunday, the public market was in full blast. One man was making a tremendous outcry to attract attention to his beef. He said it was very cheap; the price was thirty-two cents a pound. Beef is very high-priced in Sicily, and so are fish, but poultry is quite cheap Palermo has a wonderful cathedral, and the guide took us there, during a mass. There was a large choir of men and boys, and an archbishop conducted the service. The old guide was a devout Catholic, and frequently crossed himself while in the cathedral, but he took us through the worshipers, to look at the different wonders, and the worshipers didn't seem to mind it, or pay any attention to us. Occasionally we stopped, afraid to go