of the border warfare still not dissipated.  But from Scutari south there were other dangers.  The Albanians were in a state of incipient revolt, and the country was unsafe for a Turkish escort, if even such protection were not to me a greater danger, and I found, not I confess without a little trepidation, that the only protection I could count on was the consular postman who rode with the mail-bag to San Giovanni di Budua, the first point at which the Austrian Lloyd steamers called.  We met with no annoyance, however, and though we had at some points curious looks we encountered nothing more offensive, but I decided to give up the remainder of the land journey till more propitious times.  San Giovanni seems to have been an important Roman port and there are interesting remains of the Imperial epoch.

On my arrival at Athens I received a telegram from my brother-in-law in London mysteriously praying me, “If you are alive, wire us.”  On the heels of that came another from my father-in-law, “If you are safe, telegraph to Marie,” one to Tricoupi, then prime minister, to ask news of me, one to the English legation from the Foreign Office demanding information of my whereabouts, and another to the same from the “Times”—­to all which I could get no explanation nor could anybody in Athens conjecture the why of the querying.  We soon learned that a telegram from Cettinje, based on a report from Albania, had reported my being beheaded in the interior of Albania.  I was honored by a question in the House of Commons, and obituary notices were general in the American papers.  The official Montenegrin journal went into mourning.  Several kind-hearted ladies waited on my wife in Florence to condole with her, but as I had telegraphed her on receipt of the telegram from her father that I was well, and the Italian papers with the news of my death had not frightened her, for she never read them, the condolence was discounted and the condoling friends went away, their object unexplained and their equanimity upset by the information that she had received a telegram from me that morning.  There was a small compensation in the reading of my obituary notices, a satisfaction that can rarely be given a man.

CHAPTER XXXIX

ITALIAN POLITICS

In the reorganization of the office consequent on the entry of a new manager, I was offered the choice between the posts of Athens and Rome.  Personally I should have preferred Athens, but I had recently established my family at Rome, and the serious objection to a family residence at Athens in the want of any refuge from the heats of the intense summer of that city at a practicable distance from it, was an insuperable obstacle to my accepting it.  The succession of Lord Dufferin to the Embassy at Rome, and the friendly personal relations which his large-hearted nature established between the Embassy and the correspondentship, made the position highly agreeable.  He was of all the diplomats I have ever known the one who best understood how to treat a correspondent.  He took my measure as correspondent and accepted me pro tanto into his confidence.  He used to say, “I tell you whatever information there is, because I know that then you will not telegraph what ought not to be telegraphed, while if you find it out for yourself I have no right to restrain you.”