Then some other follower of the Christian faith, some fellow-sufferer in the cause, had here awaited his fate. Laboriously, and to comfort his stricken heart, he had left a record in the dungeon, where he lingered and pined, to greet and console a successor. And it was no cowardly lament, no cry of despair, but a brave confession, a word of heavenly confidence and beatific submission to the Master. Quintus felt, what so many thousands have felt since: the overpowering attractiveness of example; the bliss, the charm of martyrdom. This creed, which made the most agonizing death so easy, and filled the most wretched with peace, calmness, joy--must indeed be the creed of redemption, high above all that the wisdom of men had yet devised--and it would surely pour balm even into his aching wounds, and bear him up on the wings of enthusiasm to triumph over the terrors of death. Strangely comforted, he carefully examined the walls all round, and he found numbers of inscriptions, some hardly legible in the rough stone, but all telling the same tale of suffering and of supreme faith, of death for the truth’s sake and the beatitude of a godly frame of mind. In one place, in Latin, he read as follows: “I, Sericus, forty-three years old, and I, Psyche, the daughter of Sericus, seventeen years old, write this; imprisoned here by the city-prefect under Nero. We are Christians; we die for the faith. We forgive our enemies and hope for God’s mercy.” Close by, in Greek, was written: "Blessed are they that are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven." And below this, another hand had added in continuation: “Yea verily, that is my hope and comfort, which shall strengthen me in the hour of death.” The longer Quintus lingered over these tokens of past spiritual victories, the more he felt as a wanderer might who, in the horrors of the wilderness, traced the footprints of men and so learnt that others had crossed the desert before him. He fancied himself surrounded and overshadowed by the death-defying army of martyrs, and he swore to himself that he would quail no more than Sericus and his maiden Psyche; than Archilaos, a lad of twenty, spoken of in another inscription, or than Chabrias, who left a lovely and adored bride in Rhodes, to be burnt alive or crucified in Nero’s gardens.