which lamps were placed, without which, indeed, the Catacombs must have been an impenetrable labyrinth. Cardinal Wiseman recounts a touching legend of a young girl who was employed as a guide to the places of worship in the Catacombs because, on account of her blindness, their sombre avenues were as familiar to her accustomed feet as the streets of Rome to others.

Both sides of the corridors are thickly lined with loculi or graves, which have somewhat the appearance of berths in a ship, or of the shelves in a grocer's shop; but the contents are the bones and ashes of the dead, and for labels we have their epitaphs. Figure 4 will illustrate the general character of these galleries and loculi.

The following engraving, after a sketch by Maitland, shows a gallery wider and more rudely excavated. On the right hand is seen a passage blocked up with stones, as was frequently done, to prevent accident. The daylight is seen pouring in at the further end of the gallery, as described by Prudentius,* and rendering visible the rifled graves.

It is evident that the principle followed in the formation of these galleries and loculi was the securing of the greatest amount of space for graves with the least excavation. Hence the passages are made as narrow as possible. The graves are also as close together as the friable nature of the tufa will permit, and are made to suit the shape of the body, narrow at the feet, broader at the shoulders, and often with a semi-circular excavation for the head, so as to avoid any superfluous removal of tufa. Sometimes the loculi were made large enough to hold two, three, or even four bodies, which were often * Primas namque fores summo tenus intrat hiatu

Illustratque dies limina vestibuli.—Peristephanon, ii.

placed with the head of one toward the feet of the other, in order to economize space. These were called bisomi, trisomi, and quadrisomi, respectively. The graves were apparently made as required, probably with the corpse lying beside them, as some unexcavated spaces have been observed traced in outline with chalk or paint upon the walls. Almost every inch of available space is occupied, and sometimes, though rarely, graves are

dug in the floor. The loculi are of all sizes, from that of the infant of an hour to that of an adult man. But here, as in every place of burial, the vast preponderance of children's graves is striking. How many blighted buds there are for every full-blown flower or ripened fruit!

Sometimes the loculi were excavated with mathematical precision. An example occurs in the Cemetery of St. Cyriaca, where at one end of a gallery is a tier of eight small graves for infants, then eight, somewhat larger, for children from about seven to twelve, then seven more, apparently for adult females, and lastly, a tier of six for full-grown men, occupying the entire height of the wall. Generally, however, a less regular arrangement was observed, and the graves of the young and old were intermixed, without any definite order.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to compute the number of graves in these vast cemeteries. Some seventy thousand have been counted, but they are a mere fraction of the whole, as only a small part of this great necropolis has been explored. From lengthened observation Father Marchi estimates the average number of graves to be ten, five on each side, for every seven feet of gallery. Upon this basis he computed the entire number in the Catacombs to be seven millions! The more accurate estimate of their extent made by Sig. Michele De Rossi would allow room for nearly four millions of graves, or, more exactly, about three million eight hundred and thirty-one thousand.* This seems

*In the single crypt of St. Lucina, one hundred feet by one hundred and eighty, De Rossi counted over seven hundred loculi, and estimated that nearly twice as many were destroyed, giving a total of two thousand graves in this area. The same space, with our mode of interment, would not accommodate over half the number, even though placed as close together as possible, without any room for passages.

almost incredible; but we know that for at least three hundred years, or for ten generations, the entire Christian population of Rome was buried here. And that population, as we shall see, was, even at an early period, of considerable size. In the time of persecution, too, the Christians were hurried to the tomb in crowds. In this silent city of the dead we are surrounded by a "mighty cloud of witnesses," "a multitude which no man can number," whose names, unrecorded on earth, are written in the Book of Life. For every one who walks the streets of Rome to-day are hundreds of its former inhabitants calmly sleeping in this vast encampment of death around its walls each in his narrow cell forever laid."* Till the archangel awake them they slumber. "It is scarcely known," says Prudentius, "how full Rome is of buried saints—how richly her soil abounds in holy sepulchres."

These graves were once all hermetically sealed by slabs of marble, or tiles of terra cotta. The former were generally of one piece, which fitted into a groove or mortice cut in the rock at the grave's mouth, and were securely cemented to their places, as, indeed, was absolutely necessary, from the open character of the galleries in which the graves were placed. Sometimes fragments of heathen tombstones or altars were used for this purpose. The tiles were generally smaller, two or three being required for an adult grave. They were arranged in panels, and were cemented with plaster, on which a name or symbol was often rudely scratched with a trowel while soft, as in the following illustration. Most

• Compare Bryant's Thanatopsis:

"All that tread

The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom."

In

of these slabs and tiles have disappeared, and many of the graves have long been rifled of their contents. others may still be seen the mouldering skeleton of what was once man in his strength, woman in her beauty, or a child in its innocence and glee. The annexed engraving exhibits two graves, one of which is partially open, exposing the skeleton which has reposed on its rocky bed for probably over fifteen centuries.

If these bones be touched they will generally crumble into a white, flaky powder. D'Agincourt copied a tomb (Fig. 7) in which this "dry dust of death" still retained the outline of a human skeleton. Verily, "Pulvis et umbra sumus." Sometimes, however, possibly from some constitutional peculiarity, the bones remain quite firm. notwithstanding the lapse of so many centuries. De