life should not be prematurely taxed."

Meantime the struggle for Italian unity was coming to its climax.
Mazzini and his followers were eager for a republic. Pius IX. had
given promises to the Liberal party, but afterwards abandoned it, and
fled to Gaeta. Then Mazzini turned for help to the President of the
French Republic, Louis Napoleon, who, in his heart, had no love for
republics, but sent an army to reinstate the Pope. Rome, when she
found herself betrayed, fought like a tiger. Men issued from the
workshops with their tools for weapons, while women from the housetops
urged them on. One night over one hundred and fifty bombs were thrown
into the heart of the city.

Margaret was the friend of Mazzini, and enthusiastic for Roman
liberty. All those dreadful months she ministered to the wounded and
dying in the hospitals, and was their "saint," as they called her.

But there was another reason why Margaret Fuller loved Italy.

Soon after her arrival in Rome, as she was attending vespers at St.
Peter's with a party of friends, she became separated from them.
Failing to find them, seeing her anxious face, a young Italian came
up to her, and politely offered to assist her. Unable to regain her
friends, Angelo Ossoli walked with her to her home, though he could
speak no English, and she almost no Italian. She learned afterward
that he was of a noble and refined family; that his brothers were in
the Papal army, and that he was highly respected.

After this he saw Margaret once or twice, when she left Rome for some
months. On her return, he renewed the acquaintance, shy and quiet
though he was, for her influence seemed great over him. His father,
the Marquis Ossoli, had just died, and Margaret, with her large heart,
sympathized with him, as she alone knew how to sympathize. He joined
the Liberals, thus separating himself from his family, and was made a
captain of the Civic Guard.

Finally he confessed to Margaret that he loved her, and that he "must
marry her or be miserable." She refused to listen to him as a lover,
said he must marry a younger woman,--she was thirty-seven, and he but
thirty,--but she would be his friend. For weeks he was dejected and
unhappy. She debated the matter with her own heart. Should she,
who had had many admirers, now marry a man her junior, and not of
surpassing intellect, like her own? If she married him, it must be
kept a secret till his father's estate was settled, for marriage with
a