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honey-cakes, stuffed figs. Most of the ingredients necessary for making these dainties are all but unattainable and when found must be paid for accordingly.

November 29th. This morning there was much commotion on our usually quiet hill. Heavy aeroplanes buzzed loudly overheard and cars and lorries dashed along our narrow street. I was told that Florence is filled with troops: Badoglio's soldiers, prisoners taken on the Greek islands of Leros and Semos. Thousands of these are now going to fight Italy.

And what about the hundreds of thousands of Sicilians who are, they say, being sent to work in the factories and mines of America. No doubt these men are much more willing to work over there than to fight over here; yet such wholesale deportation of human beings strongly savours of Bolshevism.

Today I went to see how the work on the new refuge was progress-ing. I was struck by the intelligence of the head workman. With his finely chiselled face, his keen grey eyes, reflecting quick compre-hension of orders that through his own initiative will be improved upon, this workman, in other clothes, might well pass as a keen-eyed intelligent hundred per cent American.

That Communism should imply a selection of such men for leader-ship in a community of workers, then indeed there would come about the much needed world-adjustment; then indeed there would be a