w about to be dissolved in the corruption of universal
sensuality. The shores of Baiae were witnesses of the orgies and
cruelties of Nero and a court made in his likeness, and the palpitating
loveliness of Capri became the hot-bed of the unnatural vices of
Tiberius. The whole of Southern Italy was sunk in a debasement of
animalism and ferocity which seemed irrecoverable, and would have been
so, had it not been for the handful of salt which a Galilean peasant had
about that time east into the putrid, fermenting mass of human society.

We must not wonder at the zeal which caused the artistic Italian nature
to love to celebrate the passing away of an era of unnatural vice and
demoniac cruelty by visible images of the purity, the tenderness, the
universal benevolence which Jesus had brought into the world.

Some time about the middle of the thirteenth century, it had been a
favorite enterprise of a princess of a royal family in Naples to erect a
convent to Saint Agnes, the guardian of female purity, out of the wrecks
and remains of an ancient temple of Venus, whose white pillars and
graceful acanthus-leaves once crowned a portion of the precipice on
which the town was built, and were reflected from the glassy blue of
the sea at its feet. It was said that this princess was the first lady
abbess. Be that as it may, it proved to be a favorite retreat for many
ladies of rank and religious aspiration, whom ill-fortune in some of its
varying forms led to seek its quiet shades, and it was well and richly
endowed by its royal patrons.

It was built after the manner of conventual buildings generally,--in a
hollow square, with a cloistered walk around the inside looking upon a
garden.

The portal at which Agnes and her grandmother knocked, after ascending
the winding staircase cut in the precipice, opened through an arched
passage into this garden.

As the ponderous door swung open, it was pleasant to hear the lulling
sound of a fountain, which came forth with a gentle patter, like that
of soft summer rain, and to see the waving of rose-bushes and golden
jessamines, and smell the perfumes of orange-blossoms mingling with
those of a thousand other flowers.

The door was opened by an odd-looking portress. She might be
seventy-five or eighty; her cheeks were of the color of very yellow
parchment drawn in dry wrinkles; her eyes were those large, dark,
lustrous ones so common in her country, but seemed, in the general decay
and shr