levated high altar and tribune, decorated with splendid mosaics of the
sixth century,--biblical subjects, in all the stiff faithfulness of the
holy old times. The marble floor is green and damp and slippery. Under
the tribune is the crypt, where the body of St. Apollinaris used to lie
(it is now under the high altar above); and as I desired to see where he
used to rest, I walked in. I also walked into about six inches of water,
in the dim, irreligious light; and so made a cold-water Baptist devotee
of myself. In the side aisles are wonderful old sarcophagi, containing
the ashes of archbishops of Ravenna, so old that the owners' names are
forgotten of two of them, which shows that a man may build a tomb
more enduring than his memory. The sculptured bas-reliefs are very
interesting, being early Christian emblems and curious devices,--symbols
of sheep, palms, peacocks, crosses, and the four rivers of Paradise
flowing down in stony streams from stony sources, and monograms, and
pious rebuses. At the entrance of the crypt is an open stone book,
called the Breviary of Gregory the Great. Detached from the church is
the Bell Tower, a circular campanile of a sort peculiar to Ravenna,
which adds to the picturesqueness of the pile, and suggests the
notion that it is a mast unshipped from its vessel, the church, which
consequently stands there water-logged, with no power to catch any wind,
of doctrine or other, and move. I forgot to say that the basilica was
launched in the year 534.

A little weary with the good but damp old Christians, we ordered our
driver to continue across the marsh to the Pineta, whose dark fringe
bounded all our horizon toward the Adriatic. It is the largest unbroken
forest in Italy, and by all odds the most poetic in itself and its
associations. It is twenty-five miles long, and from one to three in
breadth, a free growth of stately pines, whose boughs are full of music
and sweet odors,--a succession of lovely glades and avenues, with miles
and miles of drives over the springy turf. At the point where we entered
is a farmhouse. Laborers had been gathering the cones, which were heaped
up in immense windrows, hundreds of feet in length. Boys and men were
busy pounding out the seeds from the cones. The latter are used for
fuel, and the former are pressed for their oil. They are also eaten:
we have often had them served at hotel tables, and found them rather
tasteless, but not unpleasant. The turf, as we drove i