, and, passing beneath its great arches, pursued their
way along a hedge-bordered lane. In all probability, a stately Roman
street lay buried beneath that rustic-looking pathway; for they had now
emerged from the close and narrow avenues of the modern city, and were
treading on a soil where the seeds of antique grandeur had not yet
produced the squalid crop that elsewhere sprouts from them. Grassy as
the lane was, it skirted along heaps of shapeless ruin, and the bare
site of the vast temple that Hadrian planned and built. It terminated
on the edge of a somewhat abrupt descent, at the foot of which, with a
muddy ditch between, rose, in the bright moonlight, the great curving
wall and multitudinous arches of the Coliseum.

CHAPTER XVII

MIRIAM'S TROUBLE

As usual of a moonlight evening, several carriages stood at the entrance
of this famous ruin, and the precincts and interior were anything but a
solitude. The French sentinel on duty beneath the principal archway eyed
our party curiously, but offered no obstacle to their admission. Within,
the moonlight filled and flooded the great empty space; it glowed upon
tier above tier of ruined, grass-grown arches, and made them even
too distinctly visible. The splendor of the revelation took away that
inestimable effect of dimness and mystery by which the imagination
might be assisted to build a grander structure than the Coliseum, and to
shatter it with a more picturesque decay. Byron's celebrated description
is better than the reality. He beheld the scene in his mind's eye,
through the witchery of many intervening years, and faintly illuminated
it as if with starlight instead of this broad glow of moonshine.

The party of our friends sat down, three or four of them on a prostrate
column, another on a shapeless lump of marble, once a Roman altar;
others on the steps of one of the Christian shrines. Goths and
barbarians though they were, they chatted as gayly together as if they
belonged to the gentle and pleasant race of people who now inhabit
Italy. There was much pastime and gayety just then in the area of the
Coliseum, where so many gladiators and Wild beasts had fought and died,
and where so much blood of Christian martyrs had been lapped up by that
fiercest of wild beasts, the Roman populace of yore. Some youths and
maidens were running merry races across the open space, and playing at
hide and seek a little way within the duskiness of the ground tier of
arche