ITALIAN POLITICS In the reorganization of the office consequent on the entry of a new manager, I was offered the choice between the posts of Athens and Rome.

Personally I should have preferred Athens, but I had recently established my family at Rome, and the serious objection to a family residence at Athens in the want of any refuge from the heats of the intense summer of that city at a practicable distance from it, was an insuperable obstacle to my accepting it.

The succession of Lord Dufferin to the Embassy at Rome, and the friendly personal relations which his large-hearted nature established between the Embassy and the correspondentship, made the position highly agreeable.

He was of all the diplomats I have ever known the one who best understood how to treat a correspondent.

He took my measure as correspondent and accepted me _pro tanto_ into his confidence.