door of St. Peter's and look at men down toward its further extremity,

two blocks away, has a diminishing effect on them; surrounded by the

prodigious pictures and statues, and lost in the vast spaces, they look

very much smaller than they would if they stood two blocks away in the

open air. I "averaged" a man as he passed me and watched him as he

drifted far down by the baldacchino and beyond--watched him dwindle to an

insignificant school-boy, and then, in the midst of the silent throng of

human pigmies gliding about him, I lost him. The church had lately been

decorated, on the occasion of a great ceremony in honor of St. Peter, and

men were engaged, now, in removing the flowers and gilt paper from the

walls and pillars. As no ladders could reach the great heights, the men

swung themselves down from balustrades and the capitals of pilasters by

ropes, to do this work. The upper gallery which encircles the inner

sweep of the dome is two hundred and forty feet above the floor of the

church--very few steeples in America could reach up to it. Visitors

always go up there to look down into the church because one gets the best

idea of some of the heights and distances from that point. While we

stood on the floor one of the workmen swung loose from that gallery at

the end of a long rope. I had not supposed, before, that a man could

look so much like a spider. He was insignificant in size, and his rope

seemed only a thread. Seeing that he took up so little space, I could

believe the story, then, that ten thousand troops went to St. Peter's,

once, to hear mass, and their commanding officer came afterward, and not

finding them, supposed they had not yet arrived. But they were in the

church, nevertheless--they were in one of the transepts. Nearly fifty

thousand persons assembled in St. Peter's to hear the publishing of the

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The Innocents Abroad