of Sorrento for her residence, in preference to any of the beautiful
villages which impearl that fertile plain, was the existence there of
a flourishing convent dedicated to Saint Agnes, under whose protecting
shadow her young charge might more securely spend the earlier years of
her life.

With this view, having hired the domicile we have already described,
she lost no time in making the favorable acquaintance of the
sisterhood,--never coming to them empty-handed. The finest oranges of
her garden, the whitest flax of her spinning, were always reserved as
offerings at the shrine of the patroness whom she sought to propitiate
for her grandchild.

In her earliest childhood the little Agnes was led toddling to the
shrine by her zealous relative; and at the sight of her fair, sweet,
awe-struck face, with its viny mantle of encircling curls, the torpid
bosoms of the sisterhood throbbed with a strange, new pleasure, which
they humbly hoped was not sinful,--as agreeable things, they found,
generally were. They loved the echoes of her little feet down the damp,
silent aisles of their chapel, and her small, sweet, slender voice, as
she asked strange baby-questions, which, as usual with baby-questions,
hit all the insoluble points of philosophy and theology exactly on the
head.

The child became a special favorite with the Abbess, Sister Theresa, a
tall, thin, bloodless, sad-eyed woman, who looked as if she might have
been cut out of one of the glaciers of Monte Rosa, but in whose heart
the little fair one had made herself a niche, pushing her way up
through, as you may have seen a lovely blue-fringed gentian standing in
a snow-drift of the Alps with its little ring of melted snow around it.