elessly at work upon the dome.

The cathedral was consecrated on the 18th of November, 1626, the
thirteen-hundredth anniversary of a similar rite in the first cathedral.
It covers 212,321 square feet of ground, nearly twice the area of the
next largest cathedral, that of Milan, which is a little larger than St.
Paul's, of London. Its length is about equal to two ordinary city
blocks, its width to that of a short block, and its total height that of
a long block, or a little less than the height of the Great Pyramid of
Egypt. The circumference of the base of the dome is such that two
hundred ten-year-old boys and girls clasped hand to hand would just
about stretch around it. The dome rests upon four buttresses, each
seventy feet thick, and above them runs a frieze carved in letters as
high as a man. Then, one above another, are four galleries, from the
lower one of which a fine view of the inside of the church can be had.

The little black things seen crawling on the pavement away down below
are grown men and women. The whole inside of the dome is of
mosaic-work, and set in this are mosaics of the evangelists--colossal
figures, you may know, as the pen which St. Luke holds is seven feet
long.

The roof of the cathedral is reached by means of an easy slope, up which
one could ride on a donkey. Emerging on the roof, all Rome is seen, the
country from the mountains, and the blue Mediterranean Sea in the
distance. The roof holds a number of small domes, and dwellings for the
workmen and custodians, who live there with their families. But stranger
still is a fountain fed from the rain caught upon the roof. There we
would be as high as the top of many church steeples, but away above us,
like a whole mountain, would rise the dome, with a little copper ball on
the summit. If our courage and knees did not fail us, we would ascend to
that ball by staircases between the internal and external walls of the
dome, and find it large enough to hold a score of persons.

So vast is the cathedral's interior that it has an atmosphere of its
own--in winter slowly losing the heat of the preceding summer, and in
summer slowly warming up for another winter. In cold weather the poor of
Rome go there for comfort, as a Roman winter sometimes brings frosty
days and ice. A traveller says he once saw a great sheet of ice around
the fountain before the cathedral, and some little Romans awkwardly
sliding on it. For the sake of doing what he never thou