had almost struck. As if she knew that her doom was upon her,
the Eternal City arrayed herself to meet it in all her glory.

The whole world seemed to be gathered together within her
walls. Her streets were filled with crowned heads and Princes
of the Church, great ladies and great theologians, artists
and friars, diplomats and newspaper reporters. Seven hundred
bishops were there from all the corners of Christendom,
and in all the varieties of ecclesiastical magnificence in
falling lace and sweeping purple and flowing violet veils.
Zouaves stood in the colonnade of St Peter's, and Papal
troops were on the Quirinal. Cardinals passed, hatted and
robed, in their enormous carriage of state, like mysterious
painted idols. Then there was a sudden hush: the crowd grew
thicker and expectation filled, the air. Yes! it was he! He was
coming! The Holy Father! But first there appeared, mounted on a
white mule and clothed in a magenta mantle, a grave dignitary
bearing aloft a silver cross. The golden coach followed, drawn by
six horses gorgeously caparisoned, and within, the smiling white-
haired Pio Nono, scattering his benedictions, while the multitude
fell upon its knees as one man. Such were the daily spectacles of
coloured pomp and of antique solemnity, which so long as the sun
was shining, at any rate-- dazzled the onlooker into a happy
forgetfulness of the reverse side of the Papal dispensation-- the
nauseating filth of the highways, the cattle stabled in the
palaces of the great, and the fever flitting through the ghastly
tenements of the poor.

In St. Peter's, the North Transept had been screened off; rows of
wooden seats had been erected covered with Brussels carpet; and