d each other in Rome, and the vigorous sap of half-tamed
barbarian life still coursed through the pulses of Italy, Saint
Dominic rose like a reformer, a lawgiver and a peace-maker. On the
other side of the Tiber, entrenched behind baronial walls and fiercely
protected by baronial champions, was a convent of women whose practice
of their vows had become too relaxed for such a bad example to be
allowed to remain unreproved. The ecclesiastical authorities wished
peremptorily to disestablish the convent and filter its inmates
through some neighboring religious houses more zealous and more
edifying in their conduct. But the nuns, who were mostly of noble
families, appealed to their charters, their immunities and exemption
from papal jurisdiction. Their fathers and brothers, the formidable
barons who held within the papal city many strongholds well
garrisoned, took up their quarrel and dared the world to dispossess
the refractory sisterhood. Saint Dominic had just brought his friars
to the dilapidated house then known as San Sisto, had caused rapid
repairs to be made, and in his fervor had created round himself a
nucleus of ardent reformers. The Gordian knot was referred to him, and
with characteristic abruptness he promised to cut it at once. He came
alone to the gates of the convent, presented no credentials from pope
or cardinal, and asked an interview with the abbess. He spoke of the
holiness of an austere life, the reward of those that "follow the Lamb
whithersoever He goeth," the merit of obedience, the need of reform,
the great work that his order was doing for God, and the call for more
laborers in the field: he proposed to the nuns to be his helpers
among their own sex, and his coheiresses in the heavenly reward of the
future. His eloquence and zeal soon melted the haughty resolve of
the rebellious but still noble-minded women. Roused to a new sense of
power and responsibility, they embraced his rigid rule, and with the
enthusiasm of their sex, that never halts midway in reform, became
models of austerity. The better to signify to the world the spiritual
change wrought in their temper, they migrated from the abode which
they had sworn to make the symbol and palladium of their independence,
and went to San Sisto, Saint Dominic taking his monks to repeople the
convent across the Tiber left vacant by the submissive sisterhood.

It is with this new house, henceforth called San Domenico e Sisto,
that one of my earliest re