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.