vaults. The worshippers of Christ were buried in the walls on both sides of these winding passages, and their bones crumbling to dust are still shewn to curious and religious visitors after eighteen hundred years. A skull or an arm bone here and there is entire, but most of what remains now of the early Christians is crumbled, almost powdered bones. When Rome adopted Christianity at last, the remains of the more eminent among the early teachers, the "Saints," were removed from these catacombs to the newly-built churches of Rome, but the great mass of bodies buried here in the first, second and third centuries after Christ were left undisturbed. No subsequent interment took place in these catacombs, as men were buried in Christian churches after Christianity became the religion of the people.
The church of St. Sabastian was erected over catacombs where many early martyrs had been buried. What a place this for contemplation. The ruined temples of Rome mark the departing grandeur of an ancient religion; the catacombs of Rome mark the lowly origin of a modern religion.
Leaving Rome about midday on the 5th December, I travelled for hours through classic land, replete with ancient associations. The Campagna of Rome is covered with the ruins of some of those magnificent aqueducts of ancient Rome, fitly described as "Rivers on many an arch high overhead." These huge lines of arches, colossal and striking even in their ruins, show at once the untiring industry of the ancient Romans, as also their ignorance of simple law of Hydrostatics that water will always
