The summons to the police office brought him to the consulate the next morning before I was out of bed (the office and my bedroom constituted the headquarters of the government of the United States of America at Rome), with a petition to me to request the police to delay the examination until the next day, as he had two friends who would identify him, but who were that day (it was Sunday) at Tivoli for the day. As an escape was impossible, and he was in a nervous trepidation which, it was clear to see, was awful funk, I wrote the note desired; and, before the day was out, he had gone to my English colleague, the amiable Severn, and confessed that he was an impostor, a Canadian, and asked for English protection. Severn replied that without my consent he could do nothing for him; he had come with an American passport and must abide by it, unless I gave him up. He was wilted, in such a fright as I never saw a man in before or since, and he had good reason, for the penalty of coming to Rome with a false passport was imprisonment in St. Angelo. Meanwhile Miss Cushman had gone into heroics over the insult I was offering so distinguished a man as to suspect his identity, and all her clique were united in abusing me; but on Monday the impostor slipped out of Rome by the connivance of Severn, the police, and myself, after I had attached the amount of the subscriptions for his class, which were still lying at the bankers', and pledged him to abstain in future from any similar impersonation. As Miss Cushman had stood sponsor for him, she having been a pupil of the real Rarey, his confession was a mortification which she visited on my head, but as it disarmed her I was tranquil over the consequences. I was continually at war with the Confederate Americans, galled to extreme bitterness by the right I had of compelling them to take the oath of allegiance before renewing their passports. Amongst them was a very beautiful woman, a Virginian, and the wife of a commodore in the navy of the United States of America, then on service in the Potomac. She refused to take the oath, and insulted me in the grossest manner and in public, as an insulter of ladies, _etc., etc_. But all the influence she could bring to bear could not get her passport from the police without my visa; and at last, despairing of escape from Rome, she came to make her peace, meeting me at the bank, but unwilling to accept the degradation of coming to the consulate. "You are not going to make me come to your dirty little consulate, are you?" she said; to which I replied, "Oh, no; my secretary shall administer the oath to you in your bedroom, if you choose;" but, in the end, she had to take the oath and sign it, as did many of her compatriots. Amongst the Southerners who came under my administration was the wife of General Winfield Scott, commander-in-chief of our army, who actually died under my care, without a friend or relative near her.