his Holiness has carried in his own sacred hand.  This is with her a fixed idea, a positive question of salvation.  The poor old soul has not the smallest doubt, that this bit of stick will open for her the gates of Paradise.  She has made her request to a priest, who will transmit it to a Monsignore, who will forward it to a Cardinal.  Her importunity and her simplicity will, doubtless, move somebody.  She will get the precious bough, and she is convinced that when she arrives at home with it, all the devotees in the province will burst with envy.

Among these batches of ridiculous travellers, you are certain to find some ecclesiastics.  Here is one from our own country.  You have known him in France.  Does not he strike you as being somewhat changed?  Not in his looks, but his manner.  Beneath the shadow of his own church tower, in the midst of his own flock, he used to be the mildest, the meekest, and most modest of parish priests.  He bowed low to the Mayor, and to the most microscopic of the authorities.  At Rome, his hat seems glued to his head.  I almost think—­Heaven forgive me!—­it is a trifle cocked.  How jauntily his cassock is tucked up!  How he struts along the street!  Is not his hand on his hip?  Something very like it.  The reason of this change is as clear as the sun at noon.  He is in a kingdom governed by his own class.  He inhales an atmosphere impregnated with clerical pride and theocratic omnipotence.  Phiz!  It is a bottle of champagne saluting him with the cork.  By the time he has drunk all the contents of the intoxicating beverage, he will begin to mutter between his teeth that the French clergy does not get its deserts, and that we are a long time in restoring to it the property taken away by the Revolution.

I actually heard this argument maintained on board the steamer which brought me back to France.  The principal passengers were Prince Souworf, Governor of the province of Riga, one of the most distinguished men in Europe; M. de la Rochefoucauld, attached to the French embassy; M. de Angelis, a highly educated and really distinguished mercante di campagna; M. Oudry, engineer of the Civita Vecchia railway:  and a French ecclesiastic of a respectable age and corpulence.  This reverend personage, who was nowise disinclined to argumentation, and who had just left a country where the priests are never wrong, took to holding-forth after dinner upon the merits of the Pontifical Government.  I answered as well as I could, like a man unaccustomed to public speaking.  Driven to my last entrenchments, and called upon to relate some fact which should not redound to the Pope’s credit, I chose, at hazard, a recent event then known to all Rome, as it was speedily about to be to all Europe.  My honourable interlocutor met my statement with the most unqualified, formal, and unhesitating denial.  He accused me of impudently calumniating an innocent administration, and of propagating lies fabricated by the enemies of religion.  His language was so sublimely authoritative, that I felt confounded, overpowered, crushed, and, for a moment, I asked myself whether I had not really been telling a lie.