the present walls
of the city. The young man was converted to the Christian faith. The
next day witnessed the conversion of his brother, Tiburtius. Their lives
soon gave evidence of the change in their religion; they were brought
before the prefect, and, refusing to sacrifice to the heathen gods, were
condemned to death. Maximus, an officer of the prefect, was converted
by the young men on the way to execution. They suffered death with
constancy, and Maximus soon underwent the same fate. Nor was Cecilia
long spared. The prefect ordered that she should be put to death in her
own house, by being stifled in the _caldarium_, or hot-air chamber of
her baths. The order was obeyed, and Cecilia entered the place of death;
but a heavenly air and cooling dews filled the chamber, and the fire
built up around it produced no effect. For a whole day and night the
flames were kept up, but the Saint was unharmed. Then Almachius sent an
order that she should be beheaded. The executioner struck her neck three
times with his sword, and left her bleeding, but not dead, upon the
pavement of the bathroom. For three days she lived, attended by faithful
friends, whose hearts were cheered by her courageous constancy; "for she
did not cease to comfort those whom she had nurtured in the faith of the
Lord, and divided among them everything which she had." To Pope Urban,
who visited her as she lay dying, she left in charge the poor whom she
had cared for, and her house, that it might be consecrated as a church.
With this her life ended.[C] Her wasted body was reverently lifted, its
position undisturbed, and laid in the attitude and clothing of life
within a coffin of cypress-wood. The linen cloths with which the blood
of the Martyr had been soaked up were placed at her feet, with that care
that no precious drop should be lost,--a care, of which many evidences
are afforded in the catacombs. In the night, the coffin was carried out
of the city secretly to the Cemetery of Callixtus, and there deposited
by Urban in a grave near to a chamber destined for the graves of the
popes themselves. Here the "Acts of St. Cecilia" close, and, leaving her
pure body to repose for centuries in its tomb hollowed out of the rock,
we trace the history of the catacombs during those centuries in other
sources and by other ways.

[Footnote A: _The Acts of St. Cecilia_ are generally regarded by the
best Roman Catholic authorities as apochryphal. They bear internal
evidence