Indeed, the character, in a story such as I had heard, most likely to affect a child’s imagination, would pretty certainly have been, not the hero, but the villain. Mr. Ambrose and his virtues moved one to scant enthusiasm; but Cardinal Antonelli! In describing him as wicked, and cruel, and deceitful, my people were simply using the language, expressing the sentiment, of the country and the epoch: of Italy before 1870. In those days, if you were a Liberal, if you sympathised with the Italian party, as opposed to the Papal, and especially if you were a Catholic withal, and so could think no evil of the Pope himself—then Heaven help the reputation of Cardinal Antonelli! For my part, I saw a big man in a cassock, with a dark, wolfish face, and a bunch of great iron keys at his girdle, who prowled continually about the streets of Rome, attended by a gang of ruffian shim, seeking whom he could kidnap and put in prison. So that when, not very long after this, we went to Rome for a visit, my heart misgave me; it seemed as if we were marching headlong into the ogre’s den, wantonly courting peril. And during the month or two of our sojourn there, I believe I was never quite easy in my mind. At any moment we might all be captured, loaded with chains, and cast into prison: horrible stone dungeons, dark and wet, infested by rats and spiders, where we should have to sleep on straw, where they would give us nothing but bread and water to eat and drink. Charlatan. Impostor. I didn’t know what the words meant, but they stuck in my memory, and I felt that they were somehow appropriate. It was during that same visit to Rome that I had heard them. My Aunt Elizabeth, with whom we were staying, had applied them, in her vigorous way, to Mr. Ambrose (whom we had left behind us, in Florence). “Poh! An empty windbag, a canting egotist, a twopenny-halfpenny charlatan, a cheap impostor,” she had exclaimed, in the course of a discussion with my father. Charlatan, impostor: yes, that was it. A man who never did anything but make himself disagreeable—who never petted you, or played with you, or told you stories, or gave you things—who never, in fact, took any notice of you at all, except to frown, and say hist-hist, when you were enjoying yourself—well, he might be one of the greatest, and best, and wisest men in the world, but, anyhow, he was a charlatan and an impostor. I had Aunt Elizabeth’s authority for that. One day, after our return to Florence, my second-cousin Isabel (she was thirteen, and I was in love with her)—my second-cousin Isabel was playing the piano, alone with me, in the schoolroom, when Mr. Ambrose opened the door, and said, in his testiest manner: “Stop that noise—stop that noise!” “He’s a horrid pig,” cried Isabel, as soon as his back was turned.