settled quietly down, striking some of my roots into such soil as I could
find, adapting myself to circumstances, and with so much success, that,
though from first to last I hated the very sight of the little room, I
should yet have felt a singular kind of reluctance in changing it for a
better.

Hither, in the course of my incumbency, came a great variety of visitors,
principally Americans, but including almost every other nationality on
earth, especially the distressed and downfallen ones like those of Poland
and Hungary. Italian bandits (for so they looked), proscribed
conspirators from Old Spain, Spanish-Americans, Cubans who processed to
have stood by Lopez and narrowly escaped his fate, scarred French
soldiers of the Second Republic,--in a word, all sufferers, or pretended
ones, in the cause of Liberty, all people homeless in the widest sense,
those who never had a country or had lost it, those whom their native
land had impatiently flung off for planning a better system of things
than they were born to,--a multitude of these and, doubtless, an equal
number of jail-birds, outwardly of the same feather, sought the American
Consulate, in hopes of at least a bit of bread, and, perhaps, to beg a
passage to the blessed shores of Freedom. In most cases there was
nothing, and in any case distressingly little, to be done for them;
neither was I of a proselyting disposition, nor desired to make my
Consulate a nucleus for the vagrant discontents of other lands. And yet
it was a proud thought, a forcible appeal to the sympathies of an
American, that these unfortunates claimed the privileges of citizenship
in our Republic on the strength of the very same noble misdemeanors that
had rendered them outlaws to their native despotisms. So I gave them
what small help I could. Methinks the true patriots and martyr-spirits
of the whole world should have been conscious of a pang near the heart,
when a deadly blow was aimed at the vitality of a country which they have