ose days especially so. The priests were
insulted and menaced whenever it was possible to reach them covertly,
and finally one was stabbed in a crowd. Many arrests were made, and
amongst those arrested was an exile who had ventured into the city to
visit his friends. He was put on trial for the stabbing, and, though
he proved an alibi, he was condemned to death, for "some example must
be made," they said. There was not the slightest evidence against him
except that he was an exile who had no right to be in the city, and
he was executed. Every day the police had to obliterate rebellious
inscriptions from the walls, and a constant correspondence was kept up
with the patriots in Florence. To belong to the order of Freemasons
was punishable by death, but a lodge was in full activity, and when
Lincoln was assassinated it sent me, for his widow, a letter of
condolence. It was given me by Castellani, who, not being initiated,
had received it from a brother known to him. About the same time, the
revolutionary committee decided to contribute a stone from the _agger_
of Servius Tullius to the Washington monument at Washington, and got
out one of the largest, had it dressed and appropriately inscribed,
and forwarded it to Leghorn for shipment to America, the bill of
lading being sent to me for transmission.

The police regulations were extremely severe against heresy, but
brigandage was common, and the darker streets were unsafe at night to
strangers. People were not infrequently robbed in their own doorways,
and there was a recognized system of violent robbery known as "doorway
robbing." The streets were very badly lighted, and the entrance halls
on the ground floor were scarcely ever lighted, so that we always
carried wax tapers to light ourselves up to our rooms, or to visit our
friends. Incautious foreigners, ignorant of this need for precaution,
entering the dark passages, were sometimes seized by robbers hidden
behind the door, gagged, and stripped of all valuables without a
possibility of assistance unless a friend happened to enter the house
at the moment, for the police were never seen about the streets at
night. I had, in the second year of my residence, a very narrow escape
from capture by brigands, which might have been a serious matter.
I was making, with my wife and son, our _villeggiatura_ at Porto
d'Anzio, then a miserable fishing village, but, except Civita Vecchia,
the only convenient seaside locality in the Stat