The way in which the intelligence of her marriage was received by her country-people in Rome and Florence gives the strongest proof of the great esteem in which they were constrained to hold her. Equally honorable to her was the friendship of Madame Arconati, a lady of high rank and higher merit, beloved and revered as few were in the Milan of that day. She was the friend of Joseph Mazzini, and shared with George Sand and Elizabeth Barrett Browning the honors of prominence in the liberal movement and aspiration of the time. But it is in her intercourse with the people at large that we shall find the deepest evidence of her true humanity. Hers was no barren creed, divorced from beneficent action. The wounded soldiers in the hospital, the rude peasants of Rieti, knew her heart, and thought of her as "a mild saint and ministering angel."[I] Ferocious and grasping as these peasants were, she was able to overcome for the time their savage instincts, and to turn the tide of their ungoverned passions. In this place, two brothers were one day saved from the guilt of fratricide by her calm and firm intervention. Both of the men were furiously angry, and blood had already been drawn by the knife of one, when she stepped between them, and so reasoned and insisted, that the weapons were presently flung away, and the feud healed by a fraternal embrace. After this occurrence, the American lady was recognized as a peace-maker, and differences of various sorts were referred to her for settlement, much as domestic and personal difficulties had been submitted to her in her own New England. Among the troubles brought under her notice at Rieti were the constant annoyances caused by the lawless behavior of a number of Spanish troops who happened to be quartered upon the town. Between these and the villagers she succeeded in keeping the peace by means of good counsel and enforced patience. In Florence she seems to have been equally beloved and respected. A quarrel here took place between her maid, from Rieti, and a fellow-lodger, in which her earnest effort prevented bloodshed, and effectually healed the breach between the two women. The porter of the house in which she dwelt while in Florence was slowly dying of consumption; Margaret's kindness so attached him to her that he always spoke of her as _la cara signora_.