sort of eager, hurried, half-troubled reluctance, and as if he
forbore the explanation which might well be looked for by his companion.

[98] An old flower-garden in the rear of the house, set here and there
with a venerable olive-tree--a picture in pensive shade and fiery
blossom, as transparent, under that afternoon light, as the old
miniature-painters' work on the walls of the chambers within--was
bounded towards the west by a low, grass-grown hill. A narrow opening
cut in its steep side, like a solid blackness there, admitted Marius
and his gleaming leader into a hollow cavern or crypt, neither more nor
less in fact than the family burial-place of the Cecilii, to whom this
residence belonged, brought thus, after an arrangement then becoming
not unusual, into immediate connexion with the abode of the living, in
bold assertion of that instinct of family life, which the sanction of
the Holy Family was, hereafter, more and more to reinforce. Here, in
truth, was the centre of the peculiar religious expressiveness, of the
sanctity, of the entire scene. That "any person may, at his own
election, constitute the place which belongs to him a religious place,
by the carrying of his dead into it":--had been a maxim of old Roman
law, which it was reserved for the early Christian societies, like that
established here by the piety of a wealthy Roman matron, to realise in
all its consequences. Yet this was certainly unlike any cemetery
Marius had ever before seen; most obviously in this, that these people
had returned to the older fashion of disposing of [99] their dead by
burial instead of burning. Originally a family sepulchre, it was
growing to a vast necropolis, a whole township of the deceased, by
means of some free expansion of the family interest beyond its amplest
natural limits. That air of venerable beauty which characterised the
house and its precincts above, was maintained also here. It was
certainly with a great outlay of labour that these long, apparently
endless, yet elaborately designed galleries, were increasing so
rapidly, with their layers of beds or berths, one above another, cut,
on either side the path-way, in the porous tufa, through which all the
moisture filters downwards, leaving the parts above dry and wholesome.
All alike were carefully closed, and with all the delicate costliness
at command; some with simple tiles of baked clay, many with slabs of
marble, enriched by fair inscriptions: marble taken