Imagine with what feverish excitement we awoke on that Saturday, and how we watched the numbers, gazing from the carriage-windows, at the tobacco- shop! Well, not one of those numbers came out! We drove home in silence, with our feathers all drooping. However, we had had the sensation of being millionaires for those two days (ecstatic but short!), and felt that we had been defrauded by an unjust and cruel fate. Unsympathetic Mr. Marshal said, mockingly: "How could you expect anything else, when you go on excursions with the Marquis Maurriti [that was the name of Garibaldi's friend]? You might have known that you would come to grief." "Unfeeling man! Why should we come to grief?" we cried with impatience. "Because, did you not know that he has the _mal'occhio_ [the evil eye]? I thought every one knew it," said he, making signs with his fingers to counteract the effect of the devil and all his works. We said indignantly, "If every one knows it, why were we not told?" Our tormentor continued; "There is no doubt about it, and nothing can better prove that people are afraid of him than that when, the other evening, he gave a _soirée_ and invited all Rome, only half a dozen people out of some five hundred ventured to go. The mountains of sandwiches, the cart-loads of cakes, the seas of lemonade, set forth on the supper-table, were attacked only by the courageous few." "How dreadful to have such a thing said about you! Who can prove that he or any one else has got the evil eye?" "Sometimes there is no foundation for the report; perhaps some one, out of spite or jealousy, spreads the rumor, and there you are." "Does it not need more than a rumor?" I asked. "Not much; but we must not talk about him, or something dreadful will happen to us." "Do you also believe in such rank nonsense?" I asked. "Of course I do!" Mr. Marshal replied. "You can see for yourself. If you had not gone with him your horses would not have run away, and you would surely have got your million." "Well, we have escaped death and destruction and the million; perhaps we ought to be thankful. But in his case I would go and shut myself up in a monastery and have done with it." "No monastery would take him. No brotherhood would brother _him_." "You can't make me believe in the evil eye. Neither shall I ever believe in dreams again." You will hardly believe how many acquaintances I have made here. I think I know all Rome, from the Quirinal and the Vatican down. The Haseltines know nearly every one, and whom they don't know I _do_. We were invited to see the Colosseum and the Forum illuminations, and were asked to go to the Villino, which stands in the gardens of the Palace of the Caesars, just over the Forum.