insisted on going on shore. When I saw him
standing there, surrounded by his family and
some thirty trunks and packages, I tried to detain
him, for it was by no means easy to descend from
our ship to the tug; but he was resolved; and when
his lady courageously insisted and beckoned
me, saying, " Come with us!" I at once brought
my tilings on deck. We arrived safely in
Queenstown, where, in the Queen's Hotel, we
soon forgot our hardships during our equinoctial
trip in the Great Eastern.

THROUGH A DIFFICULT COUNTRY.

ROMAN models are a loquacious race, they will
not pose to an artist who does not encourage
them in full freedom of discourse, and it must
be conceded that they talk well and readily. Their
conversation is always amusing, often interesting
and suggestive. Tales of brigand life, ancient
legends, and when the door is hut, and they think
they are not overheard --- many
odd stories about the authorities too.
They can also tell us much about ourselves that
will be new to us. Antonio informs me that
all English are mad; we have the fires of
purgatory always burning within us. Don't the
padre tell him so? This is why we roll about
in a tub of water every morning to cool our
burning vitals. His hearers know that it is an
insult to an Italian to wash him. They only wash
dead bodies, but it is well known that all English
are rnad. Then, Antonio continues, Englishmen
keep horses and dogs as mad as themselves,
and they ride out dressed in the very colour of
the flames of purgatory, to run screaming and
shouting after poor foxes over the Campagna,
notwithstanding that the Holy Father has
strictly forbidden that sort of insanity, and
placed papal gendarmerie purposely to stop it;
but who can stop mad men on mad horses? If
they want foxes, he himself could catch them
any number for a Paul or two; but they are all
mad, and the dogs it is well known how they
became possessed was not the Arch-fiend
himself and a whole legion of his angels seen
to enter them bodily? He would tell me how it
was:

Antonio's story requires that I should digress a
little, and say something by way of explanation
about the Catacombs. For some years past
the pursuit of a particular object of inquiry
has-led to my passing a considerable portion
of my time in the Roman Catacombs. Not so
much in those best known to visitors and tourists,
such as St. Achili e Nereo in the Via Appia, or
St. Agnese in the Via Nomentana, where the
passages are cleared of rubbish and drained, and
in which the custodier accompanies you with a
taper, and shows you just as much or as little
as may suit his inclination. I have passed a
considerable time in these too, but more in
those recently discovered and less known ones
lying miles away from the Eternal City, where
the only available entrance is by a tortuous
chimney-like hole almost filled with rubbish,
and so insignificant in appearance that it has

remained concealed by a few bushes from the
time it was last used, some fifteen centuries
ago, until to-day.

To descend this aperture in an upright position
is, from its size, simply impossible; but
you may get down without much difficulty by
lying on your chest, and with a lighted taper in
one hand, and the other holding a rope that has
been made fast to a tree outside, sliding down
by degrees feet foremost. For the first few
yards the passage is narrowed and choked by
the rubbish, and is nearly perpendicular; a
little lower down it opens wider, and is more
oblique. Farther still, you may feel with your
feet rough steps cut in the rock, but you
may not trust to them, as the soft stone will
crumble with your weight. After descending
perhaps fifty or seventy feet with some bumping
and a few excoriations, you are suddenly pulled
up by the remains of an old stone doorway, and
you are at the bottom.

Your position, however, seems hardly to be
improved, for on passing through the doorway
you will find yourself up to the knees in a black
stagnant pool of water, through which you will
have to pass some yards till you come to the
low narrow opening on the farther side, so low
as not to allow of your standing upright, and only
wide enough to allow of one person walking
abreast. Before entering, you instinctively
stretch out your taper and take a preliminary
peep: it is not reassuring; of its length the
thick black darkness that closes over everything
at a few yards distant prevents your forming
any idea. The sides, however, you can see
plainly enough, with their horizontal niches in
tiers one above the other, and the very easily
recognisable things lying in those niches.

Dismal grim places are these Roman Catacombs.
Their black gloom, their depths, the mystery of
their countless and impenetrable ramifications;
the numberless skeletons lying by the path's
side; the strange figures painted on the walls,
with their great eyes that seem to watch and
follow you as you pass; the certainty that at
every breath you are inhaling draughts of
deadly malaria, which, bad enough in the
open air above, is infinitely intensified by
the confined atmosphere, and the wet spongy
rock below; and above all, the consciousness
that you are by yourself, cut off from the rest
of the world, some sixty or eighty feet
underground, and that if you take a wrong
turn out of the hundreds that present themselves,
or if you let your light go out, you are likely to
be irretrievably lost, as no one will come to look
for you, and no sound that you can utter will
reach the upper air. All these considerations
operate at first to make a visit to one of the
recently-opened catacombs absolutely appalling.
I say at first, for a very slight degree of use soon
begets quite an opposite sensation; and after
two or three visits, especially if made alone and
with some definite purpose, the feeling of terror
becomes replaced by a peculiar fascination, and
an almost unappeasable longing to penetrate
farther and farther into the unknown depths. Then