catacombs, and to the simple piety of the words found upon their
graves. In them is at once the exhibition and the promise of a purer
Christianity. In them, indeed, one may see only too plainly the
evidences of ignorance, the beginnings of superstitions, the first,
traces of the corruption of the truth, the proofs of false zeal and of
foolish martyrdoms,--but with these are also to be plainly seen the
purity and the spirituality of elevated Christian faith.

In the service of the Roman Church used at the removal of the bodies of
the holy martyrs from their graves in the catacombs is a prayer in which
are the words,--"Thou hast set the bodies of thy soldiers as guards
around the walls of this thy beloved Jerusalem";--and as one passes from
catacomb to catacomb, it is, indeed, as if he passed from station to
station of the encircling camp of the great army of the martyrs. Leaving
the burial-place of St. Agnes, we continue along the Nomentan Way to the
seventh milestone from Rome. Here the Campagna stretches on either side
in broad, unsheltered sweeps. Now and then a rough wall crosses the
fields, marking the boundaries of one of the great farms into which the
land is divided. On the left stands a low farm-house, with its outlying
buildings, and at a distance on each side the eye falls on low square
brick towers of the Middle Ages, and on the ruinous heaps of more
ancient tombs. The Sabine mountains push their feet far down upon the
plain, covered with a gray-green garment of olive-woods. Few scenes in
the Campagna are more striking, from the mingling of barrenness and
beauty, from the absence of imposing monumental ruins and the presence
of old associations. The turf of the wide fields was cropped in the
winter by the herds driven down at that season from the recesses of the
Neapolitan mountains, and the irregular surface of the soil afforded no
special indications of treasures buried beneath it. But the Campagna is
full of hidden graves and secreted buildings.

In the Acts of the Martyrdom of St. Alexander, who, according to the
story of the Church, was the sixth successor of St. Peter, and who was
put to death in the persecution of Trajan, in the year 117, it was said
that his body was buried by a Roman lady, Severina, "on her farm, at the
seventh milestone from Rome on the Nomentan Way." These Acts, however,
were regarded as apocryphal, and their statement had drawn but little
attention to the locality. In the spring o