tons.  Amalasuntha must have had help in getting it up there.  The lower story is partly under water.  The green grass of the inclosure in which it stands is damp enough for frogs.  An old woman opened the iron gate to let us in.  Whether she was any relation of the ancient proprietor, I did not inquire; but she had so much trouble in, turning the key in the rusty lock, and letting us in, that I presume we were the only visitors she has had for some centuries.

Old women abound in Ravenna; at least, she was not young who showed us the mausoleum of Galla Placidia.  Placidia was also prudent and foreseeing, and built this once magnificent sepulcher for her own occupation.  It is in the form of a Latin cross, forty-six feet in length by about forty in width.  The floor is paved with rich marbles; the cupola is covered with mosaics of the time of the empress; and in the arch over the door is a fine representation of the Good Shepherd.  Behind the altar is the massive sarcophagus of marble (its cover of silver plates was long ago torn off) in which are literally the ashes of the empress.  She was immured in it as a mummy, in a sitting position, clothed in imperial robes; and there the ghastly corpse sat in a cypress-wood chair, to be looked at by anybody who chose to peep through the aperture, for more than eleven hundred years, till one day, in 1577, some children introduced a lighted candle, perhaps out of compassion for her who sat so long in darkness, when her clothes caught fire, and she was burned up,—­a warning to all children not to play with a dead and dry empress.  In this resting-place are also the tombs of Honorius II., her brother, of Constantius III., her second husband, and of Honoria, her daughter.

There are no other undisturbed tombs of the Caesars in existence.  Hers is almost the last, and the very small last, of a great succession.  What thoughts of a great empire in ruins do not force themselves on one in the confined walls of this little chamber!  What a woman was she whose ashes lie there!  She saw and aided the ruin of the empire; but it may be said of her, that her vices were greater than her misfortunes.  And what a story is her life!  Born to the purple, educated in the palace at Constantinople, accomplished but not handsome, at the age of twenty she was in Rome when Alaric besieged it.  Carried off captive by the Goths, she became the not unwilling object of the passion of King Adolphus, who at length married her at Narbonne.  At the nuptials the king, in a Roman habit, occupied a seat lower than hers, while she sat on a throne habited as a Roman empress, and received homage.  Fifty handsome youths bore to her in each hand a dish of gold, one filled with coin, and the other with precious stones,—­a small part only, these hundred vessels of treasure, of the spoils the Goths brought from her country.  When Adolphus, who never abated his fondness for his Roman bride, was assassinated at Barcelona, she was