preserved among the relics of the neighbouring basilica of St. Sebastian.  Unwilling as one is to disturb a legend so beautiful, and with so touching a moral, there can be no doubt that it was an after-thought to account for the footprints; for the material on which they are impressed being white marble, proves conclusively that the slab could never have formed part of the pavement of the Appian Way, which it is well known was composed of an unusually hard lava, found in a quarry near the tomb of Caecilia Metella; and the distinct marks of the chisel which the impressions bear—­for I examined the original footprints very carefully some years ago—­indicate a very earthly origin indeed.  The traditional relic in all 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,