On this, his last visit to Rome, Garibaldi once more urged the Romans to make a supreme effort to banish the fever from their city by building the Tiber Embankment and thus preventing the river from rising and overflowing its banks. The Romans did for Garibaldi what they would not have done for any other man, and put through that splendid piece of engineering. Though to-day his statue rides in bronze on the Janiculum, Rome’s greatest monument to him remains the Tiber Embankment. To-day we recognize that he, the man of vision, saw the future truer than Crispi the statesman; it was not so in 1878, when the young King Umberto took the oath of office. Crispi, his trusted advisor, had fallen under the sway of the Iron Chancellor, and from that time stood for the Triple Alliance and German influence. Italy endured a great disappointment this year at the Congress of Berlin, from which the Italian envoy, Count Corti, returned to Rome empty handed, when by skillful diplomacy his country might easily have gained some substantial increase of territory. I remember Count Corti in the United States, when he was the Italian Minister. He was an insignificant looking man, with a very small nose, which may have had something to do with his failure! I recall a story of a heated argument between Count Corti and Vicenzo Botta, an Italian exile formerly a monk now married to an American wife. Botta spoke with great heat, pouring out a flood of invective against the church, the Pope, and the clerical party. Count Corti, a moderate man, with moderate ideas and gifts, waited for a pause in the fiery diatribe and then said with biting irony: “And _I_ was a Dominican Friar!” The host changed color, hesitated, and dropped the argument! King Victor was hardly cold when the German infiltration of Italy showed a marked increase, that quiet thorough system of penetration, which was to make Capri, Olevano, and certain other garden spots of Italy seem like German colonies. In the spring of 1879, the birthday of one of the royalties was celebrated by _tableaux vivants_ at the German Embassy, the Palazzo Cafferelli on the Capitoline Hill. “It makes me shudder to think that the Germans have gained a footing on the sacred soil of the Capitol!” a young American student said to me, as we climbed the long steps leading to the summit.