century, when the martyrs were honoured, that the crypts were
utilised for worship. And in the same way they only became places of
refuge during the persecutions, when the Christians had to conceal the
entrances to them. Previously they had remained freely and legally open.
This was indeed their true history: cemeteries four centuries old
becoming places of asylum, ravaged at times during the persecutions;
afterwards held in veneration till the eighth century; then despoiled of
their holy relics, and subsequently blocked up and forgotten, so that
they remained buried during more than seven hundred years, people
thinking of them so little that at the time of the first searches in the
fifteenth century they were considered an extraordinary discovery--an
intricate historical problem--one, moreover, which only our own age has
solved.

"Please stoop, mesdames," resumed the Trappist. "In this compartment here
is a skeleton which has not been touched. It has been lying here for
sixteen or seventeen hundred years, and will show you how the bodies were
laid out. Savants say that it is the skeleton of a female, probably a
young girl. It was still quite perfect last spring; but the skull, as you
can see, is now split open. An American broke it with his walking stick
to make sure that it was genuine."

The ladies leaned forward, and the flickering light illumined their pale
faces, expressive of mingled fright and compassion. Especially noticeable
was the pitiful, pain-fraught look which appeared on the countenance of
the daughter, so full of life with her red lips and large black eyes.
Then all relapsed into gloom, and the little candles were borne aloft and
went their way through the heavy darkness of the galleries. The visit
lasted another hour, for the Trappist did not spare a detail, fond as he
was of certain nooks and corners, and as zealous as if he desired to work
the redemption of his visitors.

While Pierre followed the others, a complete evolution took place within
him. As he looked about him, and formed a more and more complete idea of
his surroundings, his first stupefaction at finding the reality so
different from the embellished accounts of story-tellers and poets, his
disillusion at being plunged into such rudely excavated mole-burrows,
gave way to fraternal emotion. It was not that he thought of the fifteen
hundred martyrs whose sacred bones had rested there. But how humble,
resigned, yet full of hope had been th