she, taking her revenge for past tyranny, bore herself most insolently with him, and when she scratched him over the head he only whimpered and turned away, as if to avoid temptation. An injury to one of his feet made an operation necessary, and the family surgeon was called in to perform it, but found him so savage that he could not touch the foot or approach him. Mrs. Browning came and talked to him in her way, and the dog submitted at once, without a whimper, to the painful operation. She had been long dead when I knew the family. We had planned to go together--the elder Browning, Robert and Mrs. Browning, Miss Browning, my wife, and myself--to pass the summer at Fontainebleau, and we were awaiting the arrival of Robert and his wife from Florence when the news came of Mrs. Browning's illness, followed not much later by that of her death. The intrusion even of a friend was too much for this catastrophe, and we saw little more of the Brownings until years after, when other and many changes of fortune had come over us, and we met again in Italy. Out of a quiet and happy life in Normandy I was aroused by the complications of our Civil War. An intimate friend living in Paris, the late Colonel W.B. Greene, a graduate of West Point, had applied for the command of a regiment of Massachusetts troops, and offered me a position on his staff if he got it and I would come. We agreed to go together, but his impatience carried him away, and he sailed without giving me notice. I followed by the next steamer, and, leaving my wife with my parents, I went on to Washington and to Greene's headquarters. I was too late for Greene, and I could not pass the medical examination, which was then very rigid, for all the North was volunteering. "Go home," said Greene; "we have already buried all the men like you. We have not seen the enemy yet, and we have buried six per cent. of the regiment. It is no place for you." But I had no choice; there were 800,000 men enlisted, and further enlistments were countermanded. I tried to get some position with Burnside,--who was fitting out an expedition to North Carolina,--even as cook; for I could not pass for the rank and file, and Burnside, as a friend of my friends in Rhode Island, might, I thought, help me. He replied that he had already nine applications for every post at his disposal. As a last resource, I went up into the Adirondacks to raise a company of sharpshooters. My backwoodsmen were all ready to go, but they wanted special rifles and special organization, for they meant to go to "shoot secesh," not to be regular infantry. Their ambition was not reconcilable with the plans of the military authorities, so that the company was never raised, and I then turned to my plan for the consulate.