. It had
something of the exterritoriality of the same position in the Turkish
empire. The arms of my government over my door were a protection
against legal process, and I imagine that my predecessor had so
employed it, for when I had my first clothes made the tailor refused
to send them to the consulate till they were paid for. I had a right
to carry arms and shoot anywhere in the territory of the Pope, and I
had an absolute control over the passports, i.e. over the movements of
my fellow citizens, for no one who had come to Rome with the passport
of the United States of America could leave it without my visa, and I
could sequestrate the passport whenever I saw fit. But on the part of
my own government the consideration afforded was the minimum of its
kind. I had no salary, and my compensation was in fees, viz. those on
passports and the few invoices of goods sent to America, with such
notarial business as might arise. The late consul had resigned, and
gone home to fight for the Confederate cause, leaving the consulate
in the hands of a French secretary, an old and needy teacher of his
native language whenever he could find a pupil. He was satisfied with
the pittance my own means allowed me to give him, and he wrote, in a
much better French than mine would have been, the dispatches to the
Vatican. I could talk French fluently if not correctly, and that
sufficed. Before leaving Washington, I had received a hint from a
friend in the Department of State that the fewer dispatches I troubled
them with the higher would be my favor in the department, so that,
with the exception of my quarterly accounts, I had little official
writing to do; but when I came to Rome again in 1882, I was told by my
successor of that date that my file of dispatches to the department
was the only one which existed in the consular archives of the Papal
occupation of Rome.

Rome was in those days the Lotophagitis of our century, whose
population lived in an artificial peace, a sort of dreamland--artists
who, whether German, French, English, Americans, or Russians, were
more or less imbued with the feeling of the old art, and who found
their _clientele_ in people who believed, as I have heard some say,
that _any_ picture painted in Rome was better than any picture painted
elsewhere! There was, therefore, a continual exportation of copies,
good and bad, of the old masters and a few landscapes for the
remembering of localities, but the quality of the