mbers,
bearing the traces of ancient frescos, and evidently used as
chapels,--I venture to offer the information here. The reader is to
keep in his mind a darkness broken by the light of wax tapers, a
close smell, and crookedness and narrowness, or he cannot realize the
catacombs as they are in fact. Our monkish guide, before entering the
passage leading from the floor of the church to the tombs, in which
there was still some "fine small dust" of the martyrs, warned us that
to touch it was to incur the penalty of excommunication, and then
gently craved pardon for having mentioned the fact. But, indeed, it
was only to persons who showed a certain degree of reverence that
these places were now exhibited; for some Protestants who had been
permitted there had stolen handfuls of the precious ashes, merely to
throw away. I assured him that I thought them beasts to do it; and I
was afterwards puzzled to know what should attract their wantonness in
the remnants of mortality, hardly to be distinguished from the common
earth out of which the catacombs were dug.

III.

Returning to the church above we found, kneeling before one of the
altars, two pilgrims,--a man and a woman. The latter was habited in
a nun-like dress of black, and the former in a long pilgrim's coat of
coarse blue stuff. He bore a pilgrim's staff in his hand, and showed
under his close hood a fine, handsome, reverent face, full of a sort
of tender awe, touched with the pathos of penitence. In attendance
upon the two was a dapper little silk-hatted man, with rogue so
plainly written in his devotional countenance that I was not surprised
to be told that he was a species of spiritual _valet de place_,
whose occupation it was to attend pilgrims on their tour to the Seven
Churches at which these devotees pray in Rome, and there to direct
their orisons and join in them.

It was not to the pilgrims, but to the heretics that the monk now
uncovered the precious marble slab on which Christ stood when he met
Peter flying from Rome and turned him back. You are shown the prints
of the divine feet, which the conscious stone received and keeps
forever; and near at hand is one of the arrows with which St.
Sebastian was shot. We looked at these things critically, having to
pay for the spectacle; but the pilgrims and their guide were all faith
and wonder.

I remember seeing nothing else so finely superstitious at Rome. In a
chapel near the Church of St. John Lateran are, a