But that which, all unknown to Atticus, was even then burrowing and spreading beneath his beautiful gardens and palaces, the underground city of Christianity, where the faith lay like rich seed in the dark, warm earth, _that_ survives, and its ways have been worn smooth by the feet of thousands of pilgrims for nearly twenty centuries. The rent bodies and few poor ashes of the “Christian Beggars” of the Appian Way were never approached save with love and veneration, and, whereas the slab of exquisite Pentelic marble on which Annia’s epitaph—in thirty-nine Greek verses—was inscribed, has become part of a public collection, the name and date, and the rude attempt at a palm branch to indicate the martyr’s death, stand out as clear to-day on the walls of the Catacombs as they did when they were hastily scratched in the soft clay, at some midnight burial under Nero or Diocletian, the envious though mourning brethren praying “that the Church might have peace,” but, yet more fervently, that they also might be found worthy if their own hour must come first. CHAPTER II REMINISCENCES OF MODERN ROME Rome’s Seasons—Childhood Memories of a Roman Spring—My Birthday Festival—A Day in the Country—The Appian Way—Rome’s Great Wall—An Adventure with the Campagna Steers—Campagna Sheep-Dogs—Early Morning Street Scenes—The Giardino Colonna—Secluded Italian Gardens—Inroads of Commercialism—Discovery of a Dream-Garden of the Renaissance—Song of the Nightingale in the Lost Italian Garden. It is time to take breath. So far, we have been living over in mind the joys and sorrows of certain dwellers near the Appian Way, but every true story, however fair and fine, seems to run like crystal beads strung on a dark thread. The shadow of possible tragedy is behind all things human, and even the happiest tales of old leave one with a little pang at heart for the black hour of death which came to all the actors in them sooner or later. One turns with relief to the things that people wrongly call inanimate—the things of Nature, whose life is so comfortingly different from our own, so rich in vitality that each declining season is lifted up and carried on in the arms of the next, as it were, to return in all its vigour and beauty when the moment arrives.