The members of the papal party who showed the greatest spirit and the highest courage at this trying conjuncture were the Roman ladies and their foreign friends. They scraped lint for the troops as incessantly as they offered prayers to the Virgin. Some of them were trained nurses, and they were training others to tend the sick and wounded. They organized a hospital service, and when the wounded arrived from Viterbo, notwithstanding the rumors of incendiarism and massacre, they came forth from their homes, and proceeded in companies, with no male attendants but armed men, to the discharge of their self-appointed public duties. There were many foreigners in the papal ranks, and the sympathies and services of the female visitors to Rome were engaged for their countrymen. Princesses of France and Flanders might be seen by the tressel-beds of many a suffering soldier of Dauphin and Brabant; but there were numerous subjects of Queen Victoria in the papal ranks—some Englishmen, several Scotchmen, and many Irish. For them the English ladies had organized a special service. Lady St. Jerome, with unflagging zeal, presided over this department; and the superior of the sisterhood of mercy, that shrank from no toil and feared no danger in the fulfilment of those sacred duties of pious patriots, was Miss Arundel. She was leaning over the bed of one who had been cut down in the olive-wood by a sabre of Campian’s force, when a peal of artillery was heard. She thought that her hour had arrived, and the assault had commenced. “Most holy Mary!” she exclaimed, “sustain me.” There was another peal, and it was repeated, and again and again at regular intervals. “That is not a battle, it is a salute,” murmured the wounded soldier. And he was right; it was the voice of the great guns telling that the French had arrived. The consternation of the Revolutionary Committee, no longer sustained by Colonna, absent in France, was complete. Had the advanced guard of Garibaldi been in sight, it might still have been the wisest course to rise; but Monte Mario was not yet peopled by them, and an insurrection against the papal troops, reanimated by the reported arrival of the French, and increased in numbers by the fugitives from Viterbo, would have been certainly a rash and probably a hopeless effort. And so, in the midst of confused and hesitating councils, the first division of the French force arrived at the gates of Rome, and marched into the gloomy and silent city.