The cathedral was consecrated on the 18th of November, 1626, the thirteen-hundredth anniversary of a similar rite in the first cathedral. It covers 212,321 square feet of ground, nearly twice the area of the next largest cathedral, that of Milan, which is a little larger than St. Paul's, of London. Its length is about equal to two ordinary city blocks, its width to that of a short block, and its total height that of a long block, or a little less than the height of the Great Pyramid of Egypt. The circumference of the base of the dome is such that two hundred ten-year-old boys and girls clasped hand to hand would just about stretch around it. The dome rests upon four buttresses, each seventy feet thick, and above them runs a frieze carved in letters as high as a man. Then, one above another, are four galleries, from the lower one of which a fine view of the inside of the church can be had.
The little black things seen crawling on the pavement away down below are grown men and women. The whole inside of the dome is of mosaic-work, and set in this are mosaics of the evangelists—colossal figures, you may know, as the pen which St. Luke holds is seven feet long.
The roof of the cathedral is reached by means of an easy slope, up which one could ride on a donkey. Emerging on the roof, all Rome is seen, the country from the mountains, and the blue Mediterranean Sea in the distance. The roof holds a number of small domes, and dwellings for the workmen and custodians, who live there with their families. But stranger still is a fountain fed from the rain caught upon the roof. There we would be as high as the top of many church steeples, but away above us, like a whole mountain, would rise the dome, with a little copper ball on the summit. If our courage and knees did not fail us, we would ascend to that ball by staircases between the internal and external walls of the dome, and find it large enough to hold a score of persons.
So vast is the cathedral's interior that it has an atmosphere of its own—in winter slowly losing the heat of the preceding summer, and in summer slowly warming up for another winter. In cold weather the poor of Rome go there for comfort, as a Roman winter sometimes brings frosty days and ice. A traveller says he once saw a great sheet of ice around the fountain before the cathedral, and some little Romans awkwardly sliding on it. For the sake of doing what he never thought to do in Rome, he took a slide with them. The mosaic pictures, statues, and monuments are almost numberless, and the pavement of colored marble stretches away from the doors like a large polished field. Formerly, on Easter and June 28, the dome, façade, and the colonnades of the cathedral were illumined in the early evening by the light of between four and five thousand lamps. It was called the silver illumination, and is described as having been very grand and delicate. Suddenly, on a given signal, four hundred men, stationed at their posts, exchanged the lamps for lighted pitch in iron pans fastened to the ribs of the dome. Then the dome shone afar as a splendid flaming crown of light.
TIRED OUT.—Drawn by A. B. Frost.
THE LYNX.
An ugly and savage member of the great cat family is the lynx, a creature very numerous in Canada and in the wild forests of our most northern States. It is found all over Northern Europe as well, and in Germany and Switzerland; a smaller variety, called the swamp lynx, is also an inhabitant of Persia, Syria, and some portions of Egypt.