y among them! And it was no ordinary morning
into which Marius stepped forth. There was a menace in the dark masses
of hill, and motionless wood, against the gray, although apparently
unclouded sky. Under this sunless [211] heaven the earth itself seemed
to fret and fume with a heat of its own, in spite of the strong
night-wind. And now the wind had fallen.

Marius felt that he breathed some strange heavy fluid, denser than any
common air. He could have fancied that the world had sunken in the
night, far below its proper level, into some close, thick abysm of its
own atmosphere. The Christian people of the town, hardly less
terrified and overwrought by the haunting sickness about them than
their pagan neighbours, were at prayer before the tomb of the martyr;
and even as Marius pressed among them to a place beside Cornelius, on a
sudden the hills seemed to roll like a sea in motion, around the whole
compass of the horizon. For a moment Marius supposed himself attacked
with some sudden sickness of brain, till the fall of a great mass of
building convinced him that not himself but the earth under his feet
was giddy. A few moments later the little marketplace was alive with
the rush of the distracted inhabitants from their tottering houses; and
as they waited anxiously for the second shock of earthquake, a
long-smouldering suspicion leapt precipitately into well-defined
purpose, and the whole body of people was carried forward towards the
band of worshippers below. An hour later, in the wild tumult which
followed, the earth had been stained afresh with the blood of the
martyrs Felix and Faustinus--Flores [212] apparuerunt in terra
nostra!--and their brethren, together with Cornelius and Marius, thus,
as it had happened, taken among them, were prisoners, reserved for the
action of the law. Marius and his friend, with certain others,
exercising the privilege of their rank, made claim to be tried in Rome,
or at least in the chief town of the district; where, indeed, in the
troublous days that had now begun, a legal process had been already
instituted. Under the care of a military guard the captives were
removed on the same day, one stage of their journey; sleeping, for
security, during the night, side by side with their keepers, in the
rooms of a shepherd's deserted house by the wayside.

It was surmised that one of the prisoners was not a Christian: the
guards were forward to make the utmost pecuniary profit of t