m to stretch out
glorified hands of welcome to the pilgrims that are approaching the Holy
City across the soft, palpitating sea of green that lies stretched like
a misty veil around it.

Then, as now, Rome was an enchantress of mighty and wonderful power,
with her damp, and mud, and mould, her ill-fed, ill-housed populace, her
ruins of old glory rising dim and ghostly amid her palaces of to-day.
With all her awful secrets of rapine, cruelty, ambition,
injustice,--with her foul orgies of unnatural crime,--with the very
corruption of the old buried Roman Empire steaming up as from a
charnel-house, and permeating all modern life with its effluvium of
deadly uncleanness,--still Rome had that strange, bewildering charm of
melancholy grandeur and glory which made all hearts cleave to her, and
eyes and feet turn longingly towards her from the ends of the earth.
Great souls and pious yearned for her as for a mother, and could not be
quieted till they had kissed the dust of her streets. There they fondly
thought was rest to be found,--that rest which through all weary life
ever recedes like the mirage of the desert; there sins were to be
shriven which no common priest might forgive, and heavy burdens unbound
from the conscience by an infallible wisdom; there was to be revealed to
the praying soul the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of
things not seen. Even the mighty spirit of Luther yearned for the breast
of this great unknown mother, and came humbly thither to seek the repose
which he found afterwards in Jesus.

At this golden twilight-hour along the Appian Way come the pilgrims of
our story with prayers and tears of thankfulness. Agnes looks forward
and sees the saintly forms on St. John Lateran standing in a cloud of
golden light and stretching out protecting hands to bless her.

"See, see, grandmother!" she exclaimed,--"yonder is our Father's house,
and all the saints beckon us home! Glory be to God who hath brought us
hither!"

Within the church the evening-service is going on, and the soft glory
streaming in reveals that dizzying confusion of riches and brightness
with which the sensuous and color-loving Italian delights to encircle
the shrine of the Heavenly Majesty. Pictured angels in cloudy wreaths
smile down from the gold-fretted roofs and over the round, graceful
arches; and the floor seems like a translucent sea of precious marbles
and gems fused into solid brightness, and reflecting in long gleams a