The Catacombs of St. Callixtus was our next stopping place, and here again we each received a lighted taper, and forming a procession descended out of the gladsome light of day into the gloomy bowels of the earth—the burial place, and, as many think, the hiding place of the first converts to Christianity. We wind in and out a mazy labyrinth, excavations on either side of us in the soft greenish brown tufa for graves, one above another, and of irregular size. Many of these graves were rifled by barbarians for the treasure supposed to be contained therein. The sarcophagi and slabs have been carried to museums, especially to the Lateran, where, on another occasion, we studied the touching inscriptions, some of which were evidently wrought by affection and not by skilled workmen. Some frescoes remain in the Catacombs which are interesting from their very rudeness, showing that the Christians would not employ pagan art for their sacred places. Coming to the Chapel of the Bishops, we see engraved in beautiful characters this inscription, put up by Pope Damasus: “Here, if you would know, lie heaped together a number of the holy. These honored sepulchers enclose the bodies of the saints, their lofty souls the palace of heaven has received.... Here lie youths and boys, old men and their chaste descendants, who kept their virginity undefiled. Here I, Damasus, wished to have laid my limbs, but feared to disturb the holy ashes of the saints.” From the chapel a gallery leads to the Crypt of St. Cecilia. When Paschal I. had the body of this martyred virgin removed in 820, it was found “fresh and perfect as when it was first laid in the tomb, and clad in rich garments mixed with gold, with linen cloths, stained with blood, rolled up at her feet.” Although there are shafts for ventilation and light, how good it seemed to reach once more the upper air and the flood of sunlight, and to see the blue sky and green earth! On our way to the Three Taverns we pass the tomb of Seneca, the tombs of the Horatii and the Curatii, and the circular tomb of Cecilia Metella, on which Paul himself must have looked. We drive under the Arch of Drusus, which spanned the road in the apostle’s day, and so came to the Three Taverns, where the brethren met Paul, “whom, when he saw, he thanked God and took courage.” Crimson-tipped daisies were blossoming on the site of this famous meeting-place; the afternoon sun was shining on the Sabine hills and Alban Mount, and a happy lark, thinking the spring had come in this soft air, warbled to us his divine melody as our thought took flight across the centuries to that day when the apostle to the Gentiles paused here on his way to imperial Rome, where he lost his earthly life, but the message that he brought conquered Cæsar, and will yet conquer the world.