oasis of Saragossa. Just within the border line of the oasis, just below
the canal, on the sunny slope, lies the long low house of the Convent
School of the Sisters of the True Faith. Here, amid the quiet of
orchards--white in spring with blossom, the haunt of countless
nightingales, heavy with fruit in autumn, at all times the home of a
luxuriant vegetation--history has surged to and fro, like the tides
drawn hither and thither, rising and falling according to the dictates of
a far-off planet. And the moon of this tide is Rome.

For the Sisters of the True Faith are a Jesuit corporation, and their
Convent School is, now a convent, now a school, as the tide may rise or
fall. The ebb first came in 1555, when Spain threw out the Jesuits. The
flow was at its height so late as 1814, when Ferdinand VII--a Bourbon,
of course--restored Jesuitism and the Inquisition at one stroke. And
before and after, and through all these times, the tide of prosperity has
risen and fallen, has sapped and sagged and undermined with a noiseless
energy which the outer world only half suspects.

In 1835 this same long, low, quiet house amid the fruit-trees was sacked
by the furious populace, and more than one Sister of the True Faith, it
is whispered, was beaten to the ground as she fled shrieking down the
hill. In 1836 all monastic orders were rigidly suppressed by Mendizabal,
minister to Queen Christina. In 1851 they were all allowed to live again
by the same Queen's daughter, Isabel II. So wags this world into which
there came nineteen hundred years ago not peace, but a sword; a world all
stirred about by a reformed rake of Spain who, in his own words, came "to
send fire throughout the earth;" whose motto was, "Ignem veni metteri in
terram, et quid volo nisi ut accendatur."

The road that runs by the bank of the canal was deserted when the Count