ell them I am?" he asked. "Well!
let's see! You must have superintended a course of instruction in the
goose-step in your day?" "Rather so!" said he. "Very well, then. You
are Instructor in Military Exercises in her B.M. Forces! You are all
right! Come along!" And if I had said that he was Trumpeter Major of
the 600th Regiment in the British Army, it would doubtless have been
equally all right. So said, so done! And I see his bewildered look
now, as the four huge volumes, about a load for a porter, to which he
had become entitled, together with medals and documents of many kinds,
were put into his arms.

Ah! those were pleasant days! And while Italy, under the wing of
science, was plotting her independence, I was busy in forging the
chains of that dependence which was to be a more unmixed source of
happiness to me, than the independence which Italy was compassing has
yet proved to her.

Those chains, however, as regarded at all events the outward and
visible signs of them, had not got forged yet. I certainly had no
"proposed" to Theodosia. In fact, to the very best of my recollection
I never did "propose" to her--or "pop," as the hideous phrase is--any
decisive question at all. We seem, to my recollection, to have come
gradually, insensibly, and mutually to consider it a matter of course
that what we wanted was to be married, and that the only matter
which needed any words or consideration was the question, how the
difficulties in the way of our wishes were to be overcome.

In the autumn of 1847 my mother and I went to pass the winter in Rome.
My sister Cecilia's health had been failing; and it began to be feared
that there was reason to suspect the approach of the malady which had
already destroyed my brother Henry and my younger sister Emily. It
was decided therefore that she should pass the winter in Rome. Her
husband's avocations made it impossible for him to accompany her
thither, and my mother therefore took an apartment there to receive
her. It was in a small _palazzo_ in that part of the Via delle Quattro
Fontane, which is now situated between the Via Nazionale and the
Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, to the left of one going towards the
latter. There was no Via Nazionale then, and the buildings which now
make the Via delle Quattro Fontane a continuous line of street existed
only in the case of a few isolated houses and convents. It was a very
comfortable apartment, roomy, sunny, and quiet. The house exists
s