And, not many days after, before the high altar of this same Church of the Holy Apostles, Pulcheria the princess stood with her younger sisters, Arcadia and Marina, and with all the impressive ceremonial of the Eastern Church, made a solemn vow to devote their lives to the keeping of their father’s heritage and the assistance of their only brother; to forswear the world and all its allurements; never to marry; and to be in all things faithful and constant to each other in this their promise and their pledge. And they were faithful and constant. The story of those three determined young maidens, yet scarcely “in their teens,” reads almost like a page from Tennyson’s beautiful poem, “The Princess,” with which many of my girl readers are doubtless familiar. The young regent and her sisters, with their train of attendant maidens, renounced the vanity of dress--wearing only plain and simple robes; they spent their time in making garments for the poor, and embroidered work for church decorations; and with song and prayer and frugal meals, interspersed with frequent fasts, they kept their vow to “forswear the world and its allurements,” in an altogether strict and monotonous manner. Of course this style of living is no more to be recommended to healthy, hearty, fun-loving girls of fifteen than is its extreme of gayety and indulgence, but it had its effect in those bad old days of dissipation and excess, and the simplicity and soberness of this wise young girl’s life in the very midst of so much power and luxury, made even the worst elements in the empire respect and honor her. It would be interesting, did space permit, to sketch at length some of the devisings and doings of this girl regent of sixteen. “She superintended with extraordinary wisdom,” says the old chronicler Sozemon, “the transactions of the Roman government,” and “afforded the spectacle,” says Ozanam, a later historian, “of a girlish princess of sixteen, granddaughter and sole inheritor of the genius and courage of Theodosius the Great, governing the empires of the east and west, and being proclaimed on the death of her brother, Augusta, Imperatrix, and mistress of the world!” This last event--the death of Theodosius the Younger--occurred in the year 449, and Pulcheria ascended the golden throne of Constantinople--the first woman that ever ruled as sole empress of the Roman world. She died July 18, 453. That same year saw the death of her youthful acquaintance, Attila the Hun, that fierce barbarian whom men had called the “Scourge of God.” His mighty empire stretched from the great wall of China to the Western Alps; but, though he ravaged the lands of both eastern and western Rome, he seems to have been so managed or controlled by the wise and peaceful measures of the girl regent, that his destroying hordes never troubled the splendid city by the Golden Horn which offered so rare and tempting a booty.