probability belonged to the early
subterranean cemetery--leading by a door out of the left aisle of the
church of St. Sebastian, to which the name of Catacomb was originally
applied.

Slabs with footprints carved upon them are by no means rare in Rome.
In the Kircherian Museum, in the room devoted to early Christian
antiquities, there is a square slab of white marble with two pairs of
footprints elegantly incised upon it, pointed in opposite directions,
as if produced by a person going and returning, or by two persons
crossing each other. There is no record from what catacomb this
sepulchral slab was taken. We have descriptions of other relics of the
same kind from the Roman Catacombs,--such as a marble slab bearing
upon it the mark of the sole of a foot, with the words "In Deo"
incised upon it at the one end, and at the other an inscription in
Greek meaning "Januaria in God"; and a slab with a pair of footprints
carved on it covered with sandals, well executed, which was placed by
a devoted husband over the loculus or tomb of his wife. Impressions of
feet shod with shoes or sandals are much rarer than those of bare
feet; and a pair of feet is a more customary representation than a
single foot, which, when carved, is usually in profile. In a dark,
half-subterranean chapel, green with damp, belonging to the church of
St. Christina in the town of Bolsena, on the great Volscian Mere of
Macaulay, there is a stone let into the front of the altar, and
protected by an iron grating, on which is rudely impressed a pair of
misshapen feet very like those in the church of St. Sebastian at Rome.
In the lower church at Assisi there is a duplicate of these
footprints. The legend connected with them says that they were
produced by the feet of a Christian lady named Christina, living in
the neighbourhood in pagan times, who was thrown into the adjoining
lake by her persecutors, with a large flat stone attached to her body.
Instead of sinking her, the stone formed a raft which floated her in a
standing attitude safely to the opposite shore, where she
landed--leaving the prints of her feet upon the stone as an
incontestable proof of the reality of the miracle. The altar with
which the slab is engrafted--with a stone _baldacchino_ over it--I may
mention, was the scene of the famous miracle of Bolsena, when a
Bohemian priest, officiating here in 1263, was cured of his sceptical
doubts regarding the reality of transubstantiation by the sudd