I should go to Milan and carry the proclamations which Kossuth was to issue to the Hungarian soldiers of the Italian garrison there, ordering them, in case of any revolt, not to fire on insurgent Italians.  This was in prevision of the insurrection which Mazzini had determined for the spring of 1853, and with regard to which there were grave dissensions between the two chiefs.  Kossuth was not ready for the Hungarian rising, and refused to order it till there was a prospect of success, while Mazzini believed that, even if unsuccessful, the rising was necessary to keep his influence on the Italian population, which was already shaken.  Kossuth said to me that he disapproved Mazzini’s plans, for he refused “to play with the blood of the nations;” but, if Mazzini persisted, he would give the order to the Hungarian troops not to fire on the people if any rising should take place; more than that he could not do.

Pending the ripening of Mazzini’s scheme I waited in London, at the orders of Kossuth, but before the moment came for my undertaking this mission a new one became urgent.  When the Hungarian insurrection of 1848-49 had become evidently a failure, and Kossuth was about to escape into Turkey, he decided to conceal, in some place secure from Austrian discovery, the crown jewels, including the crown of St. Stephen, which was considered by the Hungarian people as necessary to the lawful coronation of their king, and with which Francis Joseph had not been crowned; and he and Bartholomew Szemere, one of his colleagues in the ministry—­employing for their operations a detachment of prisoners, who were shot after the concealment was complete—­buried the jewels at some point down the Danube.  Having received information that Szemere, who was then opposed to Kossuth, was about to disclose their hiding-place to the Austrian government, Kossuth determined to remove them, and organized an expedition to this end, of which I was to become the apparent head.  The description of the hiding-place was written in a most complicated cipher dispatch, the key to which was contained in a stanza of a song known to Kossuth’s correspondent in Pesth.  Each letter in the dispatch was represented by a fraction, of which the numerator was the number of the letter in one of the lines of the song, and the denominator the number of the line.  This dispatch was then written in four parts; the first, fifth, ninth, etc., letters being put in the first part; the second, sixth, tenth, etc., in the second; the third, seventh, eleventh, etc., in the third; the fourth, eighth, twelfth, etc., in the fourth, and so on to the end.  Of these parts of the dispatch, written on the finest paper, I had charge of two; one for myself, and one for a person indicated at Pesth, and the other two were to go by way of Constantinople, one for the confederate who carried it and one for the correspondent who had the song-key.  We were to meet and spell out the directions and go to the hiding-place, and, when the jewels were recovered, they were to be hidden in a box of a conserve for which that vicinity was noted, and then carried to Constantinople, from which point I was to take charge of them and deliver them in Boston to Dr. S.G.  Howe, the well-known Philhellene.