hivalrous refusal to forget
or finally desert the helpless, had ever counted with Marius as the
central exponent or symbol of all natural duty.

The stern soul of the excellent Jonathan Edwards, applying the
faulty theology of John Calvin, afforded him, we know, the vision of
infants not a span long, on the floor of hell. Every visitor to the
Catacombs must have observed, in a very different theological
connexion, the numerous children's graves there--beds of infants, but a
span long indeed, lowly "prisoners of hope," on these sacred floors.
It was with great curiosity, certainly, that Marius considered them,
decked in some instances with the favourite toys of their tiny
occupants--toy-soldiers, little chariot-wheels, the entire
paraphernalia of a baby-house; and when he saw afterwards the living
children, who sang and were busy above--sang their psalm Laudate Pueri
Dominum!--their very faces caught for him a sort of quaint unreality
from the memory [102] of those others, the children of the Catacombs,
but a little way below them.

Here and there, mingling with the record of merely natural decease, and
sometimes even at these children's graves, were the signs of violent
death or "martyrdom,"--proofs that some "had loved not their lives unto
the death"--in the little red phial of blood, the palm-branch, the red
flowers for their heavenly "birthday." About one sepulchre in
particular, distinguished in this way, and devoutly arrayed for what,
by a bold paradox, was thus treated as, natalitia--a birthday, the
peculiar arrangements of the whole place visibly centered. And it was
with a singular novelty of feeling, like the dawning of a fresh order
of experiences upon him, that, standing beside those mournful relics,
snatched in haste from the common place of execution not many years
before, Marius became, as by some gleam of foresight, aware of the
whole force of evidence for a certain strange, new hope, defining in
its turn some new and weighty motive of action, which lay in deaths so
tragic for the "Christian superstition." Something of them he had
heard indeed already. They had seemed to him but one savagery the
more, savagery self-provoked, in a cruel and stupid world.

And yet these poignant memorials seemed also to draw him onwards
to-day, as if towards an image of some still more pathetic suffering,
[103] in the remote background. Yes! the interest, the expression, of
the entire neighbourhood was instinct wi