The officer, after his bath, went into the hall where the events of the morning were being discussed, and where Fulvius was waiting, till Corvinus should tell him that all was ready. Upon going out, disgusted, he felt himself, as he walked, pricked by something on his chest: he examined his garments, and found the paper. It was written in about as elegant a latinity as Cucumio’s epitaph, but he made it out sufficiently to consider it necessary for him to turn his steps towards the Via Appia, instead of the Palatine, and convey the important information to the Christians assembled in the cemetery. Having, however, found a fleeter and surer messenger than himself, in the poor blind girl, who would not attract the same attention, he stopped her, gave her the note, after adding a few words to it, with the pen and ink which he carried, and bade her bear it, as speedily as possible, to its destination. But, in fact, he had hardly left the baths, when Fulvius received information that Corvinus and his troop were by that time hastening across the fields, so as to avoid suspicion, towards the appointed spot. He mounted his horse immediately, and went along the high-road; while the Christian soldier, in a by-way, was instructing his blind messenger. When we accompanied Diogenes and his party through the catacombs, we stopped short of the subterranean church, because Severus would not let it be betrayed to Torquatus. In this the Christian congregation was now assembled, under its chief pastor. It was constructed on the principle common to all such excavations, for we can hardly call them edifices. The reader may imagine two of the _cubicula_ or chambers, which we have before described, placed one on each side of a gallery or passage, so that their doors, or rather wide entrances, are opposite one another. At the end of one will be found an _arcosolium_ or altar-tomb: and the probable conjecture is, that in this division the men, under charge of the _ostiarii_,[148] and in the other the women, under the care of the deaconesses, were assembled. This division of the sexes at divine worship was a matter of jealous discipline in the early Church. [Illustration: Ruins of the basilica of St. Alexander, on the Nomentan Way. From Roller’s “Catacombes de Rome.”] Often these subterranean churches were not devoid of architectural decoration. The walls, especially near the altar, were plastered and painted, and half columns, with their bases and capitals, not ungracefully cut out of the sandstone, divided [Illustration: Confirmation, in the Early Ages of the Church.]