Women always seem to have had great influence on the life of their times in Alsace. Not even those with the vote and all the rights, together with all the privileges of our times, can pretend to half the influence of certain holy women of the so-called dark ages. They built on hilltops and in valleys those many citadels of peace whose traces still are to be seen, where life was free from violence, and, like sweet odors uncorked, their good deeds have perfumed the ages. Saint-Odile, _Vierge Candide et Forte_, daughter of Duke Atalric, is patroness of Alsace, and in her many have sought the feminine ideal of the Alsatian soul; and there are Saint-Richarde, tried by fire for a guiltless love, wife of Louis the Fat, and Herrade, Abbess of Hohenburg, author of the famous _Hortus Deliciarum_, preserved through seven centuries and destroyed in the siege of Strasbourg in 1870. These are but a few, and the histories of the secular dwellers in the Rhine Valley, spectacular though they were, seem often quite colorless contrasted with those of these saints of the Holy Roman Empire. The first monks and pilgrims to come to Alsace were from Ireland (the last of these before the very end of the world will doubtless also come from Erin). It would appear that even in those days it could not be said of the Irish that they were neither hot nor cold, which is probably one of the reasons “why God loves them.” In the lovely rivered plains and great forests of the Rhine Valley it was they who built the first chapels and traced the first paths. It was an Irish monk whom Atalric, hoping for a son, consulted before the birth of his daughter; but of Saint-Odile another time. The house next the one wherein I dwell was that of the abbess, and now belongs to Madame Auguste Lauth. It, too, has a beautiful stairway, with a time-polished oaken balustrade, and it contains the great room of noble proportions and lovely panelings (still heated by the celebrated porcelain stove, fit only for a museum), where the ladies of the Chapter assembled in their rich toilets and great coifs to go to the church, reached by a two-storied gallery, which old prints show as having a most distinguished air, with its sloping roof pierced with oval windows and its pleasant proportions. But the upper story and the roof were done away with in the nineteenth century, which has demolished so much (not always in heat of battle), and it is now but a long, formless building used for some sort of storehouse connected with the Koechlin manufactories. And the way the six houses came to be constructed was this: