Page:Letters from New Zealand (Harper).djvu/321

Rh our customs and theirs. The presents are not supposed to be brought by a Santa Claus, or Father Christmas, or a Christ-child, but by a stern, terrible woman, who comes with gifts for good children, but bags of ashes for the bad ones. Her name is Befana, a corruption of Epiphania. It is said that the gifts to children are symbols of the treasures brought to the Infant Christ by the Kings from the East. On Twelfth Night we went to a festival in the Piazza di Sant' Eustachio. The Square itself and streets entering it were lined with booths, lit by flares and candles, covered with toys and sweetmeats. It was a scene of astounding merriment and uproar; crowds bent on making as much noise as possible, armed with whistles, trumpets, rattles and drums. Your only course is to buy something of the kind and join in the fun, doing as others do. The Italian can let himself go in a fashion that we Northerners can hardly imitate.

Among the churches in Rome there are many specially interesting from their association with the earliest Apostolical times. "Salute Prisca and Aquila; … Eubulus greeteth thee, and Pudens," writes St. Paul to Timothy (II Tim. iv, 19, 21). Again, "Aquila and Priscilla salute thee, with the church that is in their house (I Cor. xvi, 19). This message he sends to Corinth, where St. Luke states that St. Paul had lived for some time with them (Acts xvi, 2), having been banished from Rome with other Jews by the Emperor Claudius.

In 1776 A.D., close to the comparatively modern church of St. Prisca (Priscilla), a subterranean oratory was found, decorated with frescoes of the fourth century, of the Apostles, Also a bronze tablet, 222 A.D., stating that the house containing the oratory