My windows looked out upon the high and sombre wall which enclosed the women’s convent of San Payo. Curious to see beyond that wall, I ascended into the attics and looked down upon it from the highest window in the house, but even then I could see nothing but the garden wall, a foot and a half in breadth. San Payo was originally a monastery founded by King Castro on the occasion of his pilgrimage to the tomb of St. James in 813, and dedicated to St. Peter. As it faced the altar of the cathedral it received the name of _San Pedro de Autealtares_. Its first inmates were the holy Abbot Ildefrede and his monks, to whom had been entrusted the care of the Apostle’s sepulchre. St. Pedro de Mozonzo was its Abbot between 974 and 988, and for several centuries after that its abbots and monks were honoured and respected all over Galicia. The present building dates from the last years of the seventeenth century; its church was consecrated in the year 1707. Sanchez devotes pages to a description of the interior of this edifice, and of the marble _ara_ supposed to have stood upon the original sepulchre of St. James, but the convent itself, which now encloses women, interested me far more. From the attic window I had noted its superfluity of chimneys, and I afterwards learned that when the building became a nunnery it was inhabited by nuns from rich families, and that each had her own servant and her own kitchen, until the archbishop, looking into the matter, decided that one kitchen ought to be enough for them all, and that the nuns ought to wait upon themselves. I was allowed to enter the great door, and ascend the broad flight of steps to the wooden window where visitors are allowed on certain days to speak with, but not to see, the nuns, and on the landing I met the priest whose duty it was to minister to their spiritual wants. After a little conversation, I asked him how the nuns who had grown old in the convent managed without servants. He smiled at my question, and replied that the younger nuns waited on the older ones and did the housework for them. “But,” I persisted, “they must all grow old in time?” To which he answered that new ones were continually entering the convent and taking the place of the old ones. Only three men ever enter those doors, the priest, the sacristan of the conventual church, and the carpenter who nails the dead nuns into their coffins and carries them out. There is a legend among the townspeople to the effect that, a long time ago, one of the more youthful of the nuns, getting heartily tired of her life of seclusion within those gloomy walls, let herself down, by a rope made of twisted sheets, from one of the windows into the Quintana, or what is now the _Plaza de los Literarios_, intending to escape with a lover who had won her heart before she had taken the veil; but she inadvertently hung herself, and remained suspended till her corpse was discovered the following day. I