opera, a drive on the Campagna. On Sunday
mornings my youngest sister usually came to breakfast with me, and
afterward accompanied me to the Ara Coeli Church, where a military mass
was celebrated, the music being supplied by the band of a French
regiment. The time, I need scarcely say, was that of the early years of
the French occupation of the city, to which France made it her boast
that she had brought back the Pope.

As I chronicle these small personal adventures of mine, I am constrained
to blush at their insufficiency. I write as if I had forgotten the
wonderful series of events which had come to pass between my first visit
to Rome and this second tarrying within its walls. In the interval, the
days of 1848 had come and gone. France had dismissed her citizen king,
and had established a republic in place of the monarchy. The Pope of
Rome, for centuries the representative and upholder of absolute rule,
had stood before the world as the head of the Christianity which
liberalizes both institutions and ideas. In Germany the party of
progress was triumphant. Europe had trembled with the birth-pangs of
freedom. A new and glorious confederacy of states seemed to be promised
in the near future. The tyrannies of the earth were surely about to meet
their doom.

My own dear eldest son was given to me in the spring of this terrible
and splendid year of 1848. When his father wrote "_Dieu donne_" under
the boy's name in the family Bible, he added to the welcome record the
new device, "_Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite_." The first Napoleon had
overthrown rulers and dynasties. A greater power than his now came upon
the stage,--the power of individual conviction backed by popular
enthusiasm.

My husband, who had fought for Greek freedom in his youth, who had
risked and suffered imprisonment in behalf of Poland in his early
manhood, and who had devoted his mature life to the service of humanity,
welcomed the new state of things with all the enthusiasm of his generous
nature. To him, as to many, the final emancipation and unification of
the human race, the millennium of universal peace and good-will, seemed
near at hand. Alas! the great promise brought only a greater failure.
The time for its fulfillment had not yet arrived. Freedom could not be
attained by striking an attitude, nor secured by the issuing of a
document. The prophet could see the plan of the new Jerusalem coming
down from heaven, but the fact remained that the city of