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VI.
LORD, WHITHER GOEST THOU?
AFEW days after the scene above described, armed
officers of the law came to the dwellings of Peter
and Paul, seized the apostles and dragged them, with
stripes and blows, to the Mamertine prison.
In Rome, many a rumor was in circulation among the
people, of the horrors of that prison ; and those who
knew something of it, did not disprove this talk.
The Mamertine prison, or the Tullianum, as it was
also called, was and yet is situated at the foot of the
Capitoline rock, near the Roman market. The way of
the sorrowful that led thither, ascended the height a
little distance, by stairs, to an iron door, which, once
closed behind the prisoner, seldom opened for him, until
he was conveyed to the place of execution—if he had not
previously died in the jail, by strangulation or hunger.
Through this door, the apostles were led into a room,
around the cold stuccoed walls of which, were stone
benches ; and on these walls were modest frescoes, paint-
ed by some journeyman, who had probably not thought
of the cutting contrast in which the merry subjects he
had chosen for his pencil, stood, to the spirit of the place
and the humor of its unhappy denizens. In the middle
of the floor was a square hole, through which the prison-
ers were by a ladder taken down into a dark and humid
prison vault, the actual Mamertine jail, as it was called
—
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