relation with
my child. I thought the mother's heart lived in me before, but it did
not;--I knew nothing about it. Yet, before his birth, I dreaded it.
I thought I should not survive: but if I did, and my child did, was I
not cruel to bring another into this terrible world? I could not, at
that time, get any other view. When he was born, that deep melancholy
changed at once into rapture: but it did not last long. Then came the
prudential motherhood. I grew a coward, a care-taker, not only for the
morrow, but, impiously faithless, for twenty or thirty years ahead.
It seemed very wicked to have brought the little tender thing into
the midst of cares and perplexities we had not feared in the least
for ourselves. I imagined everything;--he was to be in danger of
every enormity the Croats were then committing upon the infants
of Lombardy;--the house would be burned over his head; but, if he
escaped, how were we to get money to buy his bibs and primers? Then
his father was to be killed in the fighting, and I to die of my cough,
&c. &c.

During the siege of Rome, I could not see my little boy. What I
endured at that time, in various ways, not many would survive. In the
burning sun, I went, every day, to wait, in the crowd, for letters
about him. Often they did not come. I saw blood that had streamed on
the wall where Ossoli was. I have a piece of a bomb that burst close
to him. I sought solace in tending the suffering men; but when I
beheld the beautiful fair young men bleeding to death, or mutilated
for life, I felt the woe of all the mothers who had nursed each to
that full flower, to see them thus cut down. I felt the _consolation_,
too,--for those youths died worthily. I was a Mater Dolorosa, and I
remembered that she who helped Angelino into the world came from the
sign of the Mater Dolorosa. I thought, even if he lives, if he comes
into the world at this great troubled time, terrible with perplexed
duties, it may be to die thus at twenty years, one of a glorious
hecatomb, indeed, but still a sacrifice! It seemed then I was willing
he should die.

* * * * *

Angelino's birth-place is thus sketched:

My baby saw mountains when he first looked forward into the world.
RIETI,--not only an old classic town of Italy, but one founded by what
are now called the Aborigines,--is a hive of very ancient dwellings
with red brown roofs, a citadel and several towers. It is in a
plain, twelve miles in