few days under guard. hear your news."

Now let me

"It was only this, madame: Word was brought in that two priests from Montreal were wandering above the falls, and trying to cross the St. John in order to make their way to D'Aulnay's fort at Penobscot. So I set after them and brought them in, and they are now in the keep, waiting your pleasure."

"Doubtless you did right,” hesitated Madame La Tour. "Even priests may be working us harm, so hated are we of Papists. But have them out directly, Klussman. We must not be rigorous. Did they bear any papers?'

"No, madame; and they said they had naught to do with D'Aulnay, but were on a mission to the Abenakis around Penobscot, and had lost their course and wandered here. One of them is that Father Isaac Jogues who was maimed by the Mohawks, when he carried papistry among them; and the other is his donné, a name these priests give to any man who of his own free will goes with them to be servant of the mission."

"Bring them out of the keep," said Madame La Tour.

The Swiss walked with ringing foot toward the stairway, and dropped upon one knee to unbar the door in the pavement. He took a key from his pocket and turned it in the lock, and, as he lifted the heavy leaf of beams and crosspieces, his lady held over the darkness a candle which she had taken from one of the buffet sconces. Out of the vault rose a chill breath, from which the candle flame recoiled.

"Monsieur," she spoke downward, "will you have the goodness to come up with your companion?"

Her voice resounded in the hollow; and some movement occurred below as soft-spoken answer was made: madame."

"We come,

A cassocked Jesuit appeared under the light, followed by a man wearing

the ordinary dress of a French colonist. They ascended the stone steps, and Klussman replaced the door with a clank which echoed around the hall. Marie gave him the candle, and with clumsy touch he fitted it to the sconce while she led her prisoners to the fire. The Protestant was able to dwell with disapproval on the Jesuit's black gown, though it proved the hard service of a missionary priest; the face of Father Jogues none but a savage could resist.

His downcast eyelids were like a woman's, and so was his delicate mouth. The cheeks, shading inward from their natural oval, testified to a life of hardship. His full and broad forehead, bordered by dered by a fringe of hair left around his tonsure, must have overbalanced his lower face, had that not been covered by a short beard, parted on the upper lip and peaked at the end. His eyebrows were well marked, and the large-orbed eyes seemed so full of smiling meditation that Marie said to herself, “This lovely, woman-looking man hath the presence of an angel, and we have chilled him in our keep!"

"Peace be with you, madame," spoke Father Jogues.

66

Monsieur, I crave your pardon for the cold greeting you have had in this fortress. We are people who live in perils, and we may be over-suspicious."

"Madame, I have no complaint to bring against you."

Both men were shivering, and she directed them to places on the settle. They sat where the vagrant girl had huddled. Father Jogues warmed his hands, and she noticed how abruptly serrated by missing or maimed fingers was their tapered shape. The man who had gone out to the cook-house returned with platters, and, in passing the Swiss lieutenant, gave him a hurried word, on which the Swiss left the hall. The two men made space for Father Jogues at their lady's board, and brought forward another table for his donné.

"Good friends," said Marie, "this Huguenot fare is offered you heartily, and I hope you will as heartily take it, thereby excusing the hunger of a woman who has just come in from seafaring."

"Madame," returned the priest, "we have scarcely seen civilized food since leaving Montreal, and we need no urging to enjoy this bounty. But, if you permit, I will sit here beside my brother Lalande."

"As you please," she answered, glancing at the plain young Frenchman in colonial dress with suspicion that he was made the excuse for separating Romanist and Protestant.

Father Jogues saw her glance and read her thought, and silently accused himself of cowardice for shrinking, in his maimed state, from her table with the instincts of a gentle-born man. He explained, resting his hand upon the chair which had been moved from the lady's to his servant's table:

"We have no wish to be honored above our desert, madame. We are only humble missionaries, and often, while carrying the truth, have been thankful for a meal of roots or berries in the woods."

"Your humility hurts me, monsieur. On the Acadian borders we have bitter enmities, but the fort of La Tour shelters all faiths alike. We can hardly atone to so good a man for having thrust him into our keep."

Father Jogues shook his head, and put aside this apology with a gesture. The queen of France had knelt and kissed his mutilated hands, and the courtiers of Louis had praised his martyrdom. But such ordeals of compliment were harder for him to endure than the teeth and knives of the Mohawks.

As soon as Le Rossignol saw the platters appearing, she carried her mandolin to the lowest stair step and sat down to play; a quaint minstrel, holding an instrument almost as large as herself. That part of the household who lingered

in the rooms above owned this accustomed signal and appeared on the stairs: Antonia Bronck, still disturbed by the small skeleton she had seen Zélie dressing for its grave; and an elderly woman, of great bulk and majesty, with sallow hair and face, who wore, enlarged, one of the court gowns which her sovereign, the queen of England, had often praised. Le Rossignol followed these two ladies across the hall, alternately aping the girlish motion of Antonia and her elder's massive progress. She considered the Dutch gentlewoman a sweet interloper, who might, on occasions, be pardoned; but Lady Dorinda was the natural antagonist of the dwarf in Fort St. John. Marie herself seated her mother-in-law, with the graceful deference of youth to middle age and of present power to decayed grandeur. Lady Dorinda was not easy to make comfortable. The New World was hardly her sphere. In earlier life, she had learned in the school of the royal Stuarts that some people are, by divine right, immeasurably better than others, and experience had thrust her down among those unfortunate others.

Seeing there were strange men in the hall, Antonia divined that the prisoners from the keep had been brought up to supper. But Lady Dorinda settled her chin upon her necklace, and sighed a large sigh that priests and rough menat-arms should weary eyes once used to revel in court pageantry. She looked up at the portrait of her dead husband, which hung on the wall. He had been created the first knight of Acadia; and though this honor came from her king, and his son refused to inherit it after him, Lady Dorinda believed that only the misfortunes of the La Tours had prevented her from being a colonial queen.

"Our chaplain being absent in the service of Sieur de la Tour," spoke Marie, "will monsieur, in his own fashion, bless this meal?'

Father Jogues spread the remnant of his hands, but Antonia did not hear a word he breathed. She was again in Fort Orange. The Iroquois stalked up hilly paths, and swarmed around the plank huts of Dutch traders. With the savages walked this very priest, their patient drudge until some of them blasphemed, when he sternly and fearlessly denounced the sinners.

Supper was scarcely begun when the Swiss lieutenant came again into the hall and saluted his lady.

"What troubles us, Klussman?" she demanded.

"There is a stranger outside." "What does he want?" "Madame, he asks to be admitted to Fort St. John."

"Is he alone? Hath he a suspicious look?"

66 "No, madame. He bears himself openly, and like a man who is of consequence."

"How many followers has he?" "A dozen, counting Indians. But all of them he sends back to camp with our Etchemins."

"And well he may. We want no strange followers in the barracks. Have you questioned him? Whence does he come?"

"From Fort Orange, in the New Netherlands, madame."

"He is then Hollandais." Marie turned to Antonia Bronck, and was jarred by her blanching face.

"What is it, Antonia? You have no enemy to follow you into Acadia ? ”

The flaxen head was shaken for reply. "But what brings a man from Fort Orange here?"

"There be nearly a hundred men in Fort Orange," whispered Antonia.

"He says," announced the Swiss, "that he is cousin and agent of the seignior they call the patroon, and his name is Van Corlaer."

"Do you know him, Antonia ? "
"Yes."

"And is he kindly disposed to you?" "He was the friend of my husband, Jonas Bronck," trembled Antonia. "Admit him," said Marie to her lieutenant.

"Alone, madame?"

"With all his followers, if he wills it. And bring him as quickly as you can to this table."

"We need Edelwald to manage these affairs," added the lady of the fort, as her subaltern went out. "The Swiss is faithful, but he has manners as rugged as his mountains."

Mary Hartwell Catherwood.

ditions. The magnificent discovery made by Commendatore de Rossi, in 1888, of a crypt in which members of one of the noblest Roman houses had been buried, and worshiped as martyrs of the faith, can be illustrated only by a recourse to Roman historians and biographers of the time of Domitian; their names are utterly ignored by the sacred fasti which have come down to us. This fact proves that, when the official feriale, or calendar, was resumed, after the persecution of Diocletian, preference was given to the names of confessors and martyrs, whose recent deeds were still fresh in the memory of the living; and little attention, necessarily, was paid to those of the first and second centuries, whose acts had not been written, or if written had been lost during the persecutions.

The discovery above alluded to took place in the catacombs of Priscilla, near the second milestone of the Via Salaria (nova), within the inclosure of the Villa Ada, formerly belonging to King Victor Emmanuel, and now to Count Telfener. These catacombs, like all those excavated in the first century, consisted originally of small hypogæa, or crypts, independent one of the other, and occupied by a single family, or by a restricted number of families connected by friendly or religious ties. The work of connecting and merging, as it were, the crypts into an extensive underground cemetery by means of a network of galleries was done at a later period, when the only ambition of the faithful seems to have been that of securing a grave as near as possible to the cubiculum of one of the great champions of the faith. The task of reconstructing the original plan of the catacombs by investigating the date of the various groups of excavations is a very difficult one, in which Commendatore de Rossi reveals his wonderful knowledge, which may almost be called an intuition.

In exploring that portion of Pris

cilla's catacombs which is near the (modern) entrance from the Via Salaria, he saw at once that the labyrinth of more recent galleries converged toward an original crypt, shaped like a Greek T(apua), and decorated with fresco paintings of the second century. The desire to find the name and the history of the first occupants of this noble tomb, whose memory seems to have been so dear to the faithful, was strongly roused, and the earth which filled the place was carefully sifted, in the hope of discovering a clue to the mystery, overlooked or disregarded by the first explorers or devastators of the crypt. Commendatore de Rossi's exertions were rewarded by finding a fragment of a marble sarcophagus, on which the following letters were engraved :

"Acilius Rufinus, may you dwell in God; " which acclamation, corresponding to the Latin Vivas in Deo, is characteristic of the Christian epigraphy of the end of the second century, or of the beginning of the third. On the second tombstone mention is made of an Acilius Quintianus and Acilia . . parents of an Attalus. The broken name AKEIAtos or AKEIA appears on the third slab. Besides these, two more fragments of marble coffins have been found: one with the initials M(arcus) ACILio . . ., the other with the name of Claudius Acilius Valerius. The hypogeum in which these startling discoveries have taken place seems to have been built or excavated expressly to contain sarcophagi of the largest size, some fragments of which were found still lying scattered on the floor. The walls and ceiling were at first simply whitewashed, or rather plastered with fine white stucco, with plain decorations in fresco colors. At a later period, probably after the peace of Constantine, the niches were profusely ornamented with polychrome mosaics, and the walls inlaid with Oriental marbles. A staircase was also built, to put the hypogæum in direct communication with the ground above. At the southern end of the main gallery an opening was cut through the wall of a cistern, with the purpose of turning it into a chapel. The room is eight metres long, four wide, and contains an altar raised over the coffin of one of the Glabriones. Here, too, we find the same elaborate decorations already

1 The crypt contains no loculi; only recesses for marble sarcophagi.

seen in the vestibule; that is to say, marble incrustations on the walls, and mosaic paintings on the vault. The altar was flanked by two spiral columns of giallo antico.

Except a few fragments of these columns and a few marble crusts, no other relic, either written or sculptured, has been found in this noble sanctuary. That the mediæval Vandals should have laid their hands on the marbles, to burn them into lime or to use them in new constructions, may easily be understood, but the spirit of destruction of the age seems to have driven them to useless and inexcusable pillage. Every cube of the mosaic paintings was wrenched out of its socket, and even the marble coffins, in which the Glabriones had rested in peace for so many centuries, were split and hammered into atoms, so that all hope of reconstructing them has been given up.

The Manii Acilii Glabriones, the eldest branch of the Acilian family, 2 came into notoriety toward the middle of the sixth century of Rome by the exploits of Acilius Glabrio, consul in 563, and conqueror of the Macedonians at the battle of the Thermopyla. Livy calls him a new man, homo novus. Two interesting records of his successful career have come down to us: the Temple of Piety, erected by him on the west side of the forum olitorium, and dedicated ten years after the battle of the Thermopyla; and the pedestal of the equestrian statue of gilt bronze offered to him by his son. The statue was the first of its kind ever seen in Italy, prima omnium in Italia, as Livy says. The remains of the temple have been transformed into a church of S. Nicholas (S. Nicola in carcere); the pedestal of the equestrian statue was discovered by Valadier in 1808, at the foot of the steps of the temple, and buried over again.

The Acilii Glabriones grew rapidly 2 The other branches were distinguished by the surnames of Aviola, Balbus, and Clarus.