showed us a paving-stone with two great footprints in it and said that Peter’s feet made those, we lacked confidence again.  Such things do not impress one.  The monk said that angels came and liberated Peter from prison by night, and he started away from Rome by the Appian Way.  The Saviour met him and told him to go back, which he did.  Peter left those footprints in the stone upon which he stood at the time.  It was not stated how it was ever discovered whose footprints they were, seeing the interview occurred secretly and at night.  The print of the face in the prison was that of a man of common size; the footprints were those of a man ten or twelve feet high.  The discrepancy confirmed our unbelief.

We necessarily visited the Forum, where Caesar was assassinated, and also the Tarpeian Rock.  We saw the Dying Gladiator at the Capitol, and I think that even we appreciated that wonder of art; as much, perhaps, as we did that fearful story wrought in marble, in the Vatican—­the Laocoon.  And then the Coliseum.

Every body knows the picture of the Coliseum; every body recognizes at once that “looped and windowed” band-box with a side bitten out.  Being rather isolated, it shows to better advantage than any other of the monuments of ancient Rome.  Even the beautiful Pantheon, whose pagan altars uphold the cross, now, and whose Venus, tricked out in consecrated gimcracks, does reluctant duty as a Virgin Mary to-day, is built about with shabby houses and its stateliness sadly marred.  But the monarch of all European ruins, the Coliseum, maintains that reserve and that royal seclusion which is proper to majesty.  Weeds and flowers spring from its massy arches and its circling seats, and vines hang their fringes from its lofty walls.  An impressive silence broods over the monstrous structure where such multitudes of men and women were wont to assemble in other days.  The butterflies have taken the places of the queens of fashion and beauty of eighteen centuries ago, and the lizards sun themselves in the sacred seat of the Emperor.  More vividly than all the written histories, the Coliseum tells the story of Rome’s grandeur and Rome’s decay.  It is the worthiest type of both that exists.  Moving about the Rome of to-day, we might find it hard to believe in her old magnificence and her millions of population; but with this stubborn evidence before us that she was obliged to have a theatre with sitting room for eighty thousand persons and standing room for twenty thousand more, to accommodate such of her citizens as required amusement, we find belief less difficult.  The Coliseum is over one thousand six hundred feet long, seven hundred and fifty wide, and one hundred and sixty-five high.  Its shape is oval.