e will that his
vows should be fulfilled, and his sight was immediately restored. Two
friends of the noblest Italian families, the Patrizzi and Piccolomini,
joined him in leaving the world to become hermits in the desert. The
chalky cliffs overhanging the Maremma on Bernardo's estates were
selected as a fitting retreat: here they dug grottoes in the sides of a
precipice and lived on roots and water. They were soon followed by so
many penitents as to form a community requiring a government, and, the
necessity of this being made plain to them through a vision, in which
Bernardo saw a silver ladder suspended between heaven and earth, on
which white-robed monks were ascending accompanied by angels, he was
urged to go to Avignon and obtain an audience of the Pope, who gave to
the community the rule of St. Benedict.

For a century the friars labored in building their convent to
accommodate the needs of their ever-increasing numbers: the one vast
cloister was not enough, and another was added; the primitive chapel was
enlarged into a stately church, and the abbey walls were extended until,
enclosing the garden, they covered the entire promontory. Then they
ceased from their labors, and began to establish other monasteries and
send out swarms from the mother-hive to fill them, until the executive
and administrative ability to govern a small kingdom had to be supplied
from their numbers, and manual work had to give way to mental.

Another century found the abbey governed by men of culture and lovers of
the fine arts; and the celebrated painted cloister, the intarsia-work,
and the wooden sculptures, which now attract so many visitors, date from
that time. Nearly all the movable works of art, the pictures,
illuminated missals, and precious manuscripts, were confiscated at the
time of the first suppression under Napoleon, in 1810; and whatever else
could be carried off went in 1866, when the religious orders were
suppressed by the Italian government, to embellish the museums. Still,
the empty cloister, with Signorelli's and Sodoma's frescos on the walls,
Fra Giovanni of Verona's intarsia-work in the church, and the solitary
monastery itself, so silent after centuries of activity, have an
inexpressible charm, and travellers who undertake a pilgrimage hither
can never forget their impressions.

On a sunny autumn afternoon three ladies left Siena in a light wagon,
and drove over the gray upland, which was shrouded in a pale blue mis