erciful swoon from which he never awoke.
Centuries after, an explorer of this vast necropolis found crouching in
the corner of one of its chambers a fleshless skeleton, and on the tomb
above he read the words, VALERIA DORMIT IN PACE. Was it accident or
Providence, or some strange instinct of locality that had brought this
poor blighted wreck to breathe his latest sigh at the tomb of one whom
he had so loved and so wronged?

The peasants of the Campagna tell to the present day of certain strange
sounds heard at midnight from those hollow vaults--at times like the
hooting of an owl, at times like the wailing of the wind, and at times,
they whisper with bated breath, like the moaning of a soul in pain. And
the guides to the Catacombs aver, that ever on the anniversary of the
martyrdom of Valeria Callirho[e:], sighs and groans echo through the hollow
vaults--the sighs and groans, tradition whispers, of a wretched apostate
who in the ages of persecution betrayed the early Christians to a
martyr's doom.

[Illustration: ROMAN COLUMRARIUM

The Columbaria were the Pagan Roman underground sepulchres. In the many
niche-like dovecots--hence the name were placed the urns containing the
ashes of the dead whose bodies had been burned on the funeral pile.]

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XXX.

FATE OF THE PERSECUTORS--TRIUMPH OF CHRISTIANITY.

It remains only to trace briefly the fate of the unfortunate Empress
Valeria--less happy than her lowly namesake, the martyr of the
Catacombs--and the doom of the persecuting tyrants. In the violent and
bloody deaths, often more terrible than those which they inflicted on
the Christians, which overtook, with scarce an exception, these enemies
of the Church of God, the early believers recognized a divine
retribution no less inexorable than the avenging Nemesis of the Pagan
mythology.[56]

Diocletian, smitten by a mental malady, abandoned the throne of the
world for the solitude of his palace on the Illyrian shores of the
Adriatic, where tradition avers that he died by his own hand.

A still more dreadful doom befell the fierce persecutor, Galerius.
Consumed by the same loathsome and incurable disease which is recorded
to have smitten his great rivals in bloodshed, Herod the Great and
Philip II., from his dying couch he implored the prayers of the
Christians, and, stung by remorse for his cruelties, commanded the
surcease of their long and bitter persecution.

The Empress Valeria, his