aces with
occasional piers,--the passages being of sufficient width to admit of
the entrance of beasts of burden, and even of carts. The soil crumbles
so easily, that no row of excavations one above another could be made in
it; for the stroke of the pick-axe brings it down in loose masses. The
whole aspect of the sand-pit contrasts strikingly with that of the
catacombs, with their three-feet wide galleries, their perpendicular
walls, and their tier on tier of graves.

The stratum of pozzolana at the Catacombs of St. Agnes overlies a
portion of the more solid stratum of tufa, and the entrance to the
sand-pit from the cemetery is by steps leading up from the end of a long
gallery. Such an entrance could have been easily concealed; and the tufa
cut out for the graves, after having been reduced to the condition of
pozzolana, might easily at night have been brought up to the floor of
the pit. In many of the Acts of the Martyrs it is said that they were
buried _in Arenario_, "in the sand-pit,"--an expression which, there
seems no good reason for doubting, meant in the catacombs whose entrance
was at the sand-pit, they not having yet received a distinctive name.

It is difficult to convey to a distant reader even a small share of the
interest with which one sees on the spot evidences of the reality of the
precautions with which, in those early centuries, the Christians of Rome
were forced to guard themselves against a persecution which extended to
their very burial-places,--or even of the interest with which one walks
through the unchanged paths dug out of the rock by this _tenebrosa et
lucifugax natio_. In the midst of the obscurity of history and the fog
of fable, here is the solid earth giving evidence of truth. Here one
sees where, by the light of his dim candle, the solitary digger hollowed
out the grave of one of the near followers of the apostles; and here one
reads in hasty and ill-spelt inscriptions something of the affection and
of the faith of those who buried their dead in the sepulchre dug in the
rock. The Christian Rome underground is a rebuke to the Papal Rome above
it; and, from the worldly pomp, the tedious forms, the trickeries, the
mistakes, the false claims and falser assertions, the empty architecture
that reveals the infidelity of its builders, the gross materialism, and
the crass superstition of the Roman Church, one turns with relief of
heart and eyes to the poverty and bareness of the dark and narrow