rning the key in the rusty lock, and letting us in, that I presume
we were the only visitors she has had for some centuries.

Old women abound in Ravenna; at least, she was not young who showed
us the mausoleum of Galla Placidia. Placidia was also prudent and
foreseeing, and built this once magnificent sepulcher for her own
occupation. It is in the form of a Latin cross, forty-six feet in
length by about forty in width. The floor is paved with rich
marbles; the cupola is covered with mosaics of the time of the
empress; and in the arch over the door is a fine representation of
the Good Shepherd. Behind the altar is the massive sarcophagus of
marble (its cover of silver plates was long ago torn off) in which
are literally the ashes of the empress. She was immured in it as a
mummy, in a sitting position, clothed in imperial robes; and there
the ghastly corpse sat in a cypress-wood chair, to be looked at by
anybody who chose to peep through the aperture, for more than eleven
hundred years, till one day, in 1577, some children introduced a
lighted candle, perhaps out of compassion for her who sat so long in
darkness, when her clothes caught fire, and she was burned up,--a
warning to all children not to play with a dead and dry empress. In
this resting-place are also the tombs of Honorius II., her brother,
of Constantius III., her second husband, and of Honoria, her
daughter.

There are no other undisturbed tombs of the Caesars in existence.
Hers is almost the last, and the very small last, of a great
succession. What thoughts of a great empire in ruins do not force
themselves on one in the confined walls of this little chamber!
What a woman was she whose ashes lie there! She saw and aided the
ruin of the empire; but it may be said of her, that her vices were
greater than her misfortunes. And what a story is her life! Born to
the purple, educated in the palace at Constantinople, accomplished
but not handsome, at the age of twenty she was in Rome when Alaric
besieged it. Carried off captive by the Goths, she became the not
unwilling object of the passion of King Adolphus, who at length
married her at Narbonne. At the nuptials the king, in a Roman habit,
occupied a seat lower than hers, while she sat on a throne habited as
a Roman empress, and received homage. Fifty handsome youths bore to
her in each hand a dish of gold, one filled with coin, and the other
with precious stones,--a small part only, these hundred vessels of
t