of hose, torn from the
half of the leg downwards; and a red cap with a trencher was upon his
head, and it was rather a long cap, and the narrator believed that the
gaolers had dressed him thus as an insult. 'And I Stephen, the scribe,
saw it with my eyes, and with my hands I buried him, with Prosper of
Cicigliano, who had been his vassal; and no other retainers of the
Colonna would have anything to do with the matter, out of fear, as I
think.'

Five hundred years had passed since Theodora's day, four hundred more
are gone since Lorenzo the Protonotary laid his head upon the block, and
still the tradition of terror and suffering clings to Sant' Angelo, and
furnishes the subject of an all but modern drama. Such endurance in the
character of a building is without parallel in the history of
strongholds, and could be possible only in Rome, where the centuries
pass as decades, and time is reckoned by the thousand years.

[ILLUSTRATION: HOSPITAL OF SANTO SPIRITO

From a print of the last century]

The main and most important memories in the Region of Borgo, apart from
the Castle, and Saint Peter's and the Vatican, are those connected with
the Holy Office, the hospital and insane asylum of Santo Spirito, and
with the Serristori barracks. In Rome, to go to Santo Spirito means to
go mad. It is the Roman Bedlam. But there is another association with
the name, and a still sadder one. There, by the gate of the long, low
hospital, is still to be seen the Rota--the 'wheel'--the revolving
wooden drum, with its small aperture, corresponding to an opening in the
grating, through which many thousand infants have been passed by
starving women to the mystery within, to a nameless death, or to grow up
to a life almost as nameless and obscure. The mother, indeed, received a
ticket as a sort of receipt by which she could recognize her child if
she wished, but the children claimed were very few. Within, they were
received by nursing Sisters, and cared for, not always wisely, but
always kindly, and some of them grew up to happy lives. Modern charity,
in its philistinism and well-regulated activity, condemns such wholesale
readiness to take burdens which might sometimes be borne by those who
lay them down. But modern charity, in such condemnation, does not take
just account of a mother's love, and believes that to receive nameless
children in such a way would 'encourage irresponsibility,' if not vice.
And yet in Rome, where half the populatio