no one dangerously hurt.  In common language and in Roman belief, it was a miraculous escape.  The Pope, attributing his safety to the protection of the Virgin and of St. Agnes, determined at once that the convent should be rebuilt and reoccupied, and the church restored.  The work is now complete, and all the ancient charm of time and use, all the venerable look of age and quiet, have been laboriously destroyed, and gaudy, inharmonious color, gilding and polish have been substituted in their place.

The debased taste and the unfeeling ignorance of restorers have been employed, as so often in Italy, to spoil and desecrate the memorials of the past; and the munificence of Pius, Munificentia Pii IX., is placarded on the inner walls.  One is too frequently reminded at Rome of the old and new lamps in the story of Aladdin.

We turn reluctantly from the Nomentan Way, and passing through Rome, we go out of the gate which opens on the Appian.  About a mile from the present wall, just where the road divides before coming to the Catacombs of St. Callixtus, a little, ugly, white church, of the deformed architecture of the seventeenth century, recalls, by its name of Domine quo vadis? “O Lord, whither goest thou?” one of the most impressive, one of the earliest and simplest, of the many legends of the legendary religious annals of Rome.  It relates, that, at the time of the persecution of Nero, St. Peter, being then in Rome, was persuaded to fly secretly from the city, in the hope of escaping from the near peril.  Just as he reached this place, trembling, we may well believe, not more with fear than with doubt, while past scenes rose vividly before him, and the last words heard from his Master’s lips came with a flood of self-reproach into his heart,—­as he hurried silently along, with head bowed down, in the gray twilight, he became suddenly aware of a presence before him, and, looking up, beheld the form of that beloved Master whom he was now a second time denying.  He beheld him, moreover, in the act of bearing his cross.  Peter, with his old ardor, did not wait to be addressed, but said, Domine, quo vadis?—­“O Lord, whither goest thou?” The Saviour, looking at him as he had looked but once before, replied, Venio Romam iterum crucifigi,—­“I come to Rome to be crucified a second time”; and thereupon disappeared.  Peter turned, reentered the gate, and shortly after was crucified for his Lord’s sake.  His body, it is said, was laid away in a grave on the Vatican Hill, where his great church was afterwards built.

And here we come upon another legend, which takes us out again on the Appian Way, to the place where now stands the Church of St. Sebastian.  St. Gregory the Great relates in one of his letters, that, not long after St. Peter and St. Paul had suffered martyrdom, some Christians came from the East to Rome to find the bodies of these their countrymen, which they desired to carry back with them to their own land.  They