on the Appian Way, about two miles from the present walls of the city.  The young man was converted to the Christian faith.  The next day witnessed the conversion of his brother, Tiburtius.  Their lives soon gave evidence of the change in their religion; they were brought before the prefect, and, refusing to sacrifice to the heathen gods, were condemned to death.  Maximus, an officer of the prefect, was converted by the young men on the way to execution.  They suffered death with constancy, and Maximus soon underwent the same fate.  Nor was Cecilia long spared.  The prefect ordered that she should be put to death in her own house, by being stifled in the caldarium, or hot-air chamber of her baths.  The order was obeyed, and Cecilia entered the place of death; but a heavenly air and cooling dews filled the chamber, and the fire built up around it produced no effect.  For a whole day and night the flames were kept up, but the Saint was unharmed.  Then Almachius sent an order that she should be beheaded.  The executioner struck her neck three times with his sword, and left her bleeding, but not dead, upon the pavement of the bathroom.  For three days she lived, attended by faithful friends, whose hearts were cheered by her courageous constancy; “for she did not cease to comfort those whom she had nurtured in the faith of the Lord, and divided among them everything which she had.”  To Pope Urban, who visited her as she lay dying, she left in charge the poor whom she had cared for, and her house, that it might be consecrated as a church.  With this her life ended.[C] Her wasted body was reverently lifted, its position undisturbed, and laid in the attitude and clothing of life within a coffin of cypress-wood.  The linen cloths with which the blood of the Martyr had been soaked up were placed at her feet, with that care that no precious drop should be lost,—­a care, of which many evidences are afforded in the catacombs.  In the night, the coffin was carried out of the city secretly to the Cemetery of Callixtus, and there deposited by Urban in a grave near to a chamber destined for the graves of the popes themselves.  Here the “Acts of St. Cecilia” close, and, leaving her pure body to repose for centuries in its tomb hollowed out of the rock, we trace the history of the catacombs during those centuries in other sources and by other ways.

[Footnote A:  The Acts of St. Cecilia are generally regarded by the best Roman Catholic authorities as apochryphal.  They bear internal evidence of their want of correctness, and, in the condition in which they have come down to us, the date of their compilation cannot be set before the beginning of the fifth century.  At the very outset two facts stand in open opposition to their statements.  The martyrdom of St. Cecilia is placed in the reign of Alexander Severus, whose mildness of disposition and whose liberality towards the Christians are well authenticated.  Again, the prefect who condemns her to death, Turchius Almachius, bears a name unknown