It is with this new house, henceforth called San Domenico e Sisto, that one of my earliest recollections of conventual life is connected.  The order is one which enjoins strict enclosure.  The dress is of coarse white serge or flannel, consisting of a long, narrow tunic with flowing sleeves drawn over tight ones of linen; a scapular or stole (i.e., a piece of straight stuff half a yard broad worn hanging from the shoulders both behind and before); a leathern girdle round the waist, from which hangs a rosary, large, common and set in steel; strong, thick sandals; a linen wimple enveloping the face and hiding the ears, neck and roots of the hair; a woolen veil, black for the professed nuns, white for the novices, and of white linen for the lay sisters; and over all an immense black cloak, falling around the figure in statuesque folds.

In this order, and almost invariably in every other, a candidate is admitted at first as a postulant for a period of six months—­a sort of preliminary trial of her fitness for the religious life.  She wears ordinary clothes during this time—­plain and black, of course, but not of any prescribed shape.  Sometimes, however, she is required by custom to wear a plain black cap.  After six months she is admitted as a novice—­i.e., she solemnly puts off the secular dress and wears the habit of the order, making the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience for the space of one year only.  The details of the ceremony vary in different orders, but the ceremony itself is called in all by the generic name of “clothing” or “taking the white veil.”  In orders where a white woolen veil is the badge of profession (these are not many) a linen one is equally the mark of the novice and the lay sister.  Although there exists for convenience’ sake a distinction between choir-nuns and lay sisters—­the former paying a dowry to the common fund on the day of their entrance, and the latter bringing their manual service to the house instead of any offering—­still, the difference is not spiritual, and beyond the mere distribution of labor is not practically discernible.  In orders where the education of youth is the primary object, the lay sisters, under the supervision of the choir-nun to whose charge the housekeeping is directly entrusted, perform all the menial service, which would otherwise make too many inroads on the time of the teaching nuns; but in other orders, the Carmelites for instance, the lowest work, be it of the kitchen, the laundry or the chamber, is undertaken in turn by every member of the community.  When Madame Louise, the daughter of Louis XV. of France, became a Carmelite nun, the first task assigned her was the washing of coarse dishes and the sweeping of floors.  A parallel case is that of the Cistercian monks, who to this day, at their famous farm-monastery at Mount St. Bernard, England, are bound by their rule to labor with their hands so many hours a day.  No exception is made for the abbot himself; and when we visited the establishment