The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

BURIAL PLACE OF SIX MILLION DEAD.

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the most experienced archeologists have calculated the com.
bined length of these underground galleries at upwards of
nine hundred miles, and they assert that more than six millions of dead have been entombed in them. Here were the
early Christians buried during the hot days of persecution,
from the time of Christ's crucifixion to the conversion of
Constantine, 300 A. D. Painted, or carved, on the outside
of the tombs of a later period, one sees the palm branch,
the symbol of conquest. Though they had been slain, they
were conquerors. On the outside of other tombs is carved
the dove and the olive-branch. The storms of life were over
to those, buried within, and they were at rest and in peace.
In course of time, one of the popes, who wished to signalize his reign by some wonderful deed, ordered the tombs
of the Catacombs opened, in which the bodies of Christian
martyrs had been.buried, and Christian sepulture to be given
their remains. Their re-interment in consecrated burial
places was the occasion of a great pageant. During the
term of the pope next in succession, the rude inscriptions
which had been cut on the slabs that shut in the dead were
removed, and are now to be seen in the great " Hall of Inscriptions" in the Vatican Museum. The most important
and interesting of these have been collected, and arranged
in a manner that shows the contrast between them and
those taken from pagan sarcophagi and cinerary urns, which
occupy the opposite wall of the hall. The floor of the " Hall
of Inscriptions" is of tessellated marble, and the ceiling is
covered with fine frescoes. The stained glass windows impart a religious solemnity to the lofty room, where, on opposite sides, the inscriptions are inserted in the walls as high,
and as low, as one can read them. Those taken from the
Catacombs are full of hope, charity, and love, and express
firm faith in the resurrection. I transcribed a few of them: