‘The martyrdom of St. Paul’ is sometimes a separate subject, but generally it is the pendant to the martyrdom of St. Peter. According to the received tradition, the two apostles suffered at the same time, but in different places; for St. Paul, being by birth a Roman citizen, escaped the ignominy of the public exposure in the Circus, as well as the prolonged torture of the cross. He was beheaded by the sword outside the Ostian gate, about two miles from Rome, at a place called the Aqua Salvias, now the ‘Tre Fontane.’ The legend of the death of St. Paul relates that a certain Roman matron named Plautilla, one of the converts of St. Peter, placed herself on the road by which St. Paul passed to his martyrdom, in order to behold him for the last time; and when she saw him, she wept greatly, and besought his blessing. The apostle then, seeing her faith, turned to her and begged that she would give him her veil to bind his eyes when he should be beheaded, promising to return it to her after his death. The attendants mocked at such a promise, but Plautilla, with a woman’s faith and charity, taking off her veil, presented it to him. After his martyrdom, St. Paul appeared to her, and restored the veil stained with his blood. It is also related, that when he was decapitated the severed head made three bounds upon the earth, and wherever it touched the ground a fountain sprang forth. In the most ancient representations of the martyrdom of St. Paul, the legend of Plautilla is seldom omitted. In the picture of Giotto preserved in the sacristy of St. Peter’s, Plautilla is seen on an eminence in the background, receiving the veil from the hand of Paul, who appears in the clouds above; the same representation, but little varied, is executed in bas-relief on the bronze doors of St. Peter’s. The three fountains gushing up beneath the severed head are also frequently represented as a literal fact, though a manifest and beautiful allegory, figurative of the fountains of Christian faith which should spring forth from his martyrdom.