regulations in favor of Southerners was made by some one professing to speak on behalf of our own government, which was in my second year, he never permitted the least bending of them, and only in important cases, where strong personal influence was brought to bear, issued passports of the Foreign Office for Southern Americans to leave the city. Antonelli had a face which gave one an idea of the expression "beauté du Diable," for a more perfect type of Satanic intelligence and malignity than it showed at times I cannot conceive. If I had been a figure painter, I should certainly have painted him as Mephistopheles, as he appeared in the audience room in his close-fitting purple costume with scarlet trimmings, his long coat-tails flying behind him when he moved like the fringe of a flame. He was the most curious contrast to the Pope, with his humorous and kindly manner, that it is possible to conceive, for the Cardinal was nothing if not sardonic and serious. The very slightest trace of humor would have transformed him completely. Unique as was the government, so was the position of a consul. It had something of the exterritoriality of the same position in the Turkish empire. The arms of my government over my door were a protection against legal process, and I imagine that my predecessor had so employed it, for when I had my first clothes made the tailor refused to send them to the consulate till they were paid for. I had a right to carry arms and shoot anywhere in the territory of the Pope, and I had an absolute control over the passports, i.e. over the movements of my fellow citizens, for no one who had come to Rome with the passport of the United States of America could leave it without my visa, and I could sequestrate the passport whenever I saw fit. But on the part of my own government the consideration afforded was the minimum of its kind. I had no salary, and my compensation was in fees, viz. those on passports and the few invoices of goods sent to America, with such notarial business as might arise. The late consul had resigned, and gone home to fight for the Confederate cause, leaving the consulate in the hands of a French secretary, an old and needy teacher of his native language whenever he could find a pupil. He was satisfied with the pittance my own means allowed me to give him, and he wrote, in a much better French than mine would have been, the dispatches to the Vatican. I could talk French fluently if not correctly, and that sufficed. Before leaving Washington, I had received a hint from a friend in the Department of State that the fewer dispatches I troubled them with the higher would be my favor in the department, so that, with the exception of my quarterly accounts, I had little official writing to do; but when I came to Rome again in 1882, I was told by my successor of that date that my file of dispatches to the department was the only one which existed in the consular archives of the Papal occupation of Rome.