The vetturino, familiar with the land and the people, called the attention of the travellers to the fact that in Assisi there was a monastery of German Franciscan nuns. A colony of poor German women in the middle of Italian lands! That was enough to decide the party to visit the monastery and greet their pious countrywomen in the language of home. But they found the sisterhood in evident distress. As they stood before the lattice, the history of the monastery was briefly related to them by the superior. It owed its origin to the patrician family Nocker of Munich, and according to the terms of its establishment was intended only for Germans, and more particularly for Bavarian maidens. Under Napoleon I. it was suspended, and the nuns were cared for in private dwellings, where, hoping for better times, they still continued, as well as they could, the practice of their vocation. These better times came. After the fall of the Napoleonic dynasty, the purchasers of the monastery consented to relinquish it, and the poor Franciscans could at least reoccupy the building. {101} But it went so hard with them, that they were sometimes obliged to ring the distress-bell, and the number of inmates diminished. At the time of the arrival of our three travellers, they numbered but twelve. An increase of numbers under such circumstances was hardly to be hoped for, and the existence of the monastery seemed again endangered. Municipal abolishment was threatened, with the unavoidable prospect to the nuns of being distributed among the various Italian monasteries. Now to maintain themselves as a German order was everything to these Franciscans; and thus the superior represented it to her travelling country-people, with all simple-heartedness, closing her narration with the entreaty that, on their return to Munich, they would not forget the little German monastery in Assisi, but care for it as they might be able, and cause younger sisters to come to them from Bavaria, in order to save the establishment from utter extinction.