In 1859, at twenty-five, he enlisted as a volunteer in the cavalry; and in 1860, he took part in Cialdini’s campaign, but rather as an officer’s servant than as a soldier. Before starting, he wrote a patriotic hymn, which was sent to Brofferio, and surprised him by the novelty of its thoughts and the beauty of some of the verses, contrasting strangely with the roughness of the phraseology, and the numerous grammatical errors. After this, he again returned to his trade as a carter, and at the same time to his habits of debauchery and foul language. He also rejoined his wife, whom he had married three years previously, and for whom he felt a poetic affection which he carried so far as to write love-songs to her. Here, again, his ambitious ideas reappeared, and induced him anew, though so uncultivated, to seek fame through his verses and tragedies, which read like burlesques. Gradually, his fantastic delusions took another direction. In 1867, at thirty-three, he had--whether as an effect of drink, or of political excitement--a return of the religious hallucinations of 1848, in a more marked form than previously. One day he disappeared, in consequence of a vision of the Madonna, who had commanded him to go to Rome, and remind the Pope (who at first refused to receive him, but afterwards treated him with courtesy, though, it is said, not without advising him to try the remedy of a good shower-bath) of his divine mission. He then went to the hermitage of Montorio Romano, in the Sabine mountains, inhabited by a Prussian monk named Ignazio Micus. The latter kept him with him for three months in the “Grotto of the Blessed Amadeus,” directing him in his theological studies. It is very probable--though on this point we can only conjecture, as all direct evidence is wanting--that this monk assisted him to make the tattoo-marks on his forehead, which he claimed to have received from the hand of St. Peter, and which he hid under a lock of hair from the gaze of the profane, showing them only to true believers. This tattooing, according to the testimony of medical men, consists of an irregular parallelogram, on the upper side of which are thirteen dots, disposed in the form of a cross. To this mark, and to two others which he afterwards produced on himself, on the deltoid muscle and the inside of the leg, he attributed--through a tendency common among the insane--a strange and mysterious significance, as seals of a special covenant with God. [Illustration: . . | . | |. . . . . . . | | . | | . | | . | |______________|]