If I believed the stories I heard on good authority and on most positive assurance, I should put down the number of persons who died from wounds or injuries received during the melee at from twelve to fifteen.

Still, long experience has led me to place very little reliance on any Roman story I cannot test; and I am bound to say, I could not sift any one of these stories to the bottom.

On the other hand, this fact by no means causes me to disbelieve that fatal injuries may have been received.

The extreme difficulty, if not impossibility, of obtaining true information on such a point may be realized from the circumstance, that a government official was, within my knowledge, dismissed from his post for merely visiting one of the victims who had been wounded by the police.

By all accounts, even by that of the Papal partizans, the number of severe injuries inflicted was very considerable; indeed it is impossible it should have been otherwise, when one considers that along a street so crowded that the carriages could only move at a foot's pace, the gendarmes on horse and foot charged recklessly, cutting at every one they could reach.