parson of the scholarly —­earnest type, mildly donnish, with a fondness for gentle mirth.  What, however, you would scarcely have divined—­unless you had chanced to notice, inconspicuous in this sober light, the red sash round his waist, or the amethyst on the third finger of his right hand—­was his rank in the Roman hierarchy.  I have the honour of presenting his Eminence Egidio Maria Cardinal Udeschini, formerly Bishop of Cittareggio, Prefect of the Congregation of Archives and Inscriptions.

That was his title ecclesiastical.  He had two other titles.  He was a Prince of the Udeschini by accident of birth.  But his third title was perhaps his most curious.  It had been conferred upon him informally by the populace of the Roman slum in which his titular church, St. Mary of the Lilies, was situated:  the little Uncle of the Poor.

As Italians measure wealth, Cardinal Udeschini was a wealthy man.  What with his private fortune and official stipends, he commanded an income of something like a hundred thousand lire.  He allowed himself five thousand lire a year for food, clothing, and general expenses.  Lodging and service he had for nothing in the palace of his family.  The remaining ninety-odd thousand lire of his budget . . .  Well, we all know that titles can be purchased in Italy; and that was no doubt the price he paid for the title I have mentioned.

However, it was not in money only that Cardinal Udeschim paid.  He paid also in labour.  I have said that his titular church was in a slum.  Rome surely contained no slum more fetid, none more perilous—­a region of cut-throat alleys, south of the Ghetto, along the Tiber bank.  Night after night, accompanied by his stout young vicar, Don Giorgio Appolloni, the Cardinal worked there as hard as any hard-working curate:  visiting the sick, comforting the afflicted, admonishing the knavish, persuading the drunken from their taverns, making peace between the combative.  Not infrequently, when he came home, he would add a pair of stilettos to his already large collection of such relics.  And his homecomings were apt to be late—­oftener than not, after midnight; and sometimes, indeed, in the vague twilight of morning, at the hour when, as he once expressed it to Don Giorgio, “the tired burglar is just lying down to rest.”  And every Saturday evening the Cardinal Prefect of Archives and Inscriptions sat for three hours boxed up in his confessional, like any parish priest—­in his confessional at St. Mary of the Lilies, where the penitents who breathed their secrets into his ears, and received his fatherly counsels . . .  I beg your pardon.  One must not, of course, remember his rags or his sores, when Lazarus approaches that tribunal.

But I don’t pretend that the Cardinal was a saint; I am sure he was not a prig.  For all his works of supererogation, his life was a life of pomp and luxury, compared to the proper saint’s life.  He wore no hair shirt; I doubt if he knew the taste of the Discipline.  He had his weaknesses, his foibles—­even, if you will, his vices.  I have intimated that he was fond of a jest.  “The Sacred College,” I heard him remark one day, “has fifty centres of gravity.  I sometimes fear that I am its centre of levity.”  He was also fond of music.  He was also fond of snuff: