"So great a Christian host was swept away,
When Rome would have her country's gods adored.
Yet in some martyr's sepulchre his name is seen,
Or else some anagram his friends have carved.
There too are silent tombs which dumb stones close,
Telling us nothing but the number buried there.
And thus we know how many rest below,
Though names and appellations all are lost.
Beneath one single mount some sixty lie,

Though Christ alone has kept the record of these names,
As being those of his peculiar friends."

Thus it is that now, as we stand in these passages, we feel that around us is a "multitude which no man can number." Little do the dwellers in modern Rome think, that for every one who treads their streets, there are hundreds sleeping in those gloomy caverns, which everywhere surround the Eternal city and perforate the very soil on which it stands. Yet so it is. The ground has been drunk with the blood of martyrs, and the earth on which we tread is rich with the garnered dust of countless saints whose record has utterly perished from the land which was once hallowed by their footsteps.

IV.

INSCRIPTIONS IN THE CATACOMBS.

IV.

THE INSCRIPTIONS IN THE CATACOMBS.

The

THERE is an old Arabian fable, of a city whose inhabitants at once were turned to stone. maiden at the fountain, the guest in the hall, the listless wanderer in the streets, all were arrested without a moment's warning, and in the posture in which the stroke found them, were transmuted at once into marble statues. And there the city stood in the desert, with the stillness of the grave resting on it, everything unchanged, as age after age swept over it. At last came a chance traveller, and for the first time in centuries its deserted streets echoed to the tread of human footsteps, as he wandered on through palace, and temple, and hall, with none to answer his summons- -none to oppose his entrance -gazing in wonder on the memorials of generations which had lived ages before, to the possession of which none had succeeded, and, therefore, they had remained unaltered.

In our day, the deserted cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii almost furnish a reality to this fable. There, we are at once transported back to the first