present; and the attempt to identify the action of the French troops with that of the Papal gendarmes, is upset by the plain and simple fact, that the French patrols were on the Porta Pia road, and not in the Corso at all.  Indeed, if the whole matter was not too serious to laugh at, there would be something actually comical in the notion of the friends of order, or any person in their senses, stopping to applaud the gendarmes as they trampled their way through the helpless, screaming, terror-stricken crowd, striking indiscriminately at friend or foe.  The statement has this value, and this value only, that it gives the formal approval of the Government to the brutal outrages of the Papal police.

For a time the Pro-Papal party were in a state of high exultation.  A popular demonstration had been suppressed by a score or so of Pontifical troops.  The stock stories about the cowardice of the Italians were revived, and the more intemperate partizans of the Government asserted that the support of the French army was no longer needed, and that the Pope would shortly be able to rely for protection on his own troops alone.  There was in these exultations a certain sad amount of truth.  I am no blind admirer of the Romans, and I freely admit that no high-spirited crowd would have submitted to be cut down by a mere handful of gendarmes.  I admit, too, that this blood-letting stopped for the time the fashion of demonstrations.  It is however at best a doubtful compliment to a government that it has succeeded in crushing the spirit and energy of a nation; but to this compliment, I fear, the Papal rule is only too well entitled.  “The lesson given on St Joseph’s day,” so wrote the organ of the Papacy in Paris, “has profited;” how, and to whom, time will show.  Hardly, I think; at any rate, to the religion of love and mercy, or to those who preach its doctrines, and enforce its teachings by lessons such as this.

CHAPTER XIV.  A COUNTRY FAIR.

Far away among the Sabine hills, right up the valley of the Teverone, as the Romans now-a-days call the stream which once bore the name of Anio, hard by the mountain frontier-land of Naples, lies the little town of Subiaco.  I am not aware that of itself this out-of-the-world nook possesses much claim to notice.  Antiquarians, indeed, visit it to search after the traces of a palace, where Nero may or may not have dwelt.  Students of ecclesiastical lore make pilgrimages thereto, to behold the famous convent of the Santo Speco, the home of the Benedictine order.  In summer-time the artists in Rome wander out here to take shelter from the burning heat of the flat Campagna land, and to sketch the wild Salvator Rosa scenery which hems in the town on every side.  I cannot say, however, that it was love of antiquities or divinity, or even scenery, which led my steps Subiaco-wards.  The motive of my journey was of a less elevated and