The Cistercian abbey of Trebnitz, now Hedwige’s home, was the first institution of its kind for women. It was begun in 1200 and finished eighteen years later, but was ready to be inhabited in 1202. It stood in a wooded region, three miles from Breslau. The legend of its foundation, as commemorated in an old rhyme or _Volkslied_ (people’s song), refers it to a vow made by Henry, who, while out hunting, got entangled in a morass and could see no human means of rescue; but what is certain is that the royal couple had long planned and looked forward to a monastery for women, and the date of the laying of the first stone of Trebnitz corresponds with that of Henry’s accession to the throne. The building was intended to accommodate a thousand persons, and was built by the hands of convicts and prisoners, even those who were condemned to death, whose work on it was to be equivalent to the rest of their sentence. Hedwige’s pity for, and kindness to, captives, whether innocent or guilty, was a conspicuous trait of her character; and the undeserved physical hardships of prisoners in those times were enough to turn the sympathies of every kind-hearted person from justice towards the criminal. In the same way did the neglected sick, and especially the lepers, touch her heart; indeed, all the oldest hospitals in Silesia are due to her. The neighboring Cistercian monks of Leubus cast the leaden plates for the roof and the smaller bells of the new monastery, in return for which Henry gave them two estates; and the duke himself with his foremost nobles inspected the progress of the work, and solemnly made the round of the land deeded to the institution, marking his own name on the boundary stones. Bishop Egbert of Bamberg, Hedwige’s brother (this was before his disgrace), procured a body of Cistercian nuns of his diocese as a beginning, and accompanied them himself on their journey to their new home. Hedwige’s great-uncle, Provost Popo of Bamberg, came too, and the meeting of these strangers with the high clergy of Silesia and Poland was, as the old chroniclers would have said, “a brave and pleasant sight.” The buildings were decorated with evergreens, and the pomp of jewelled garments, clerical and national costumes, armor, horses richly caparisoned, embroidered robes and canopies, was dazzling. It was the Sunday within the octave of the feast of the Epiphany—a sharp, bright winter’s day; the cavalcade from the court of Breslau, consisting of the duke and duchess and their retinue, escorted the nuns and the foreign ecclesiastics, while the bishops of Breslau and Posen, each with his chapter, and the Cistercian abbot under whose jurisdiction Trebnitz was placed, received the latter at the gate of the finished portion of the new church. Here the duke handed the Abbess Petrussa, Hedwige’s old friend and teacher, a deed of the property henceforth belonging to the order—a document which, like all following ones of the same kind, ended