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248 attention. Nor do the officiating priests seem to mind what the people are doing. They are frequented as much on week-days as on Sundays.

Rome is unique; a city of modern life, tramways, electric light, hotels, palaces, and crowds of people; yet also a city of the past and of the dead. Its three hundred churches are full of graves; outside the walls in the Catacombs, with galleries extending many miles, there are millions buried. The famous Via Appia, begun as far back as 300 B.C., and extending to Brindisi, for several miles outside the city is bordered with tombs and monuments. We went down the Callixtine Catacomb, which lies a little way off this road. Steep steps lead into a gallery branching out in various directions, with descents into galleries below. These are cut out of soft tufa rock, allowing room for walking upright, and in places opening out into chambers of some size. A perfectly dry atmosphere, and good ventilation, but a place of absolute darkness, lit up only by the candle which everyone carries. A guide precedes, and it is necessary to keep together, for there are gruesome tales of people lost and perishing in these subterranean mazes. In the walls of the galleries there are cavities containing stone coffins, with inscriptions recording the names and ages of the dead, mostly Christian, but some Pagan. I saw on the coffin of a little girl her toys in bone and wood and marble; over another, on a brick, the imprint of a die, with the date of year and the names of the Consuls, 257 A.D. Curious that it never occurred to them to use the same means for printing on paper or parchment. Entering one of the chambers, one saw that it had been used for Christian worship; at one end a large sarcophagus used as an altar; over