the forest ground, over the scantier trees to the left, rises, solitary and austere, the convent of the Augustinian hermits, San Salvatore di Lecceto: "a blessed place," writes Ambrogio Landucci, "in which the Most High chose to work so many wonders." According to tradition, the disciples of St Ansanus fled to these woods when the Roman persecutors discovered their hiding-places in the city; St Augustine found hermits here in the fourth century, and gave them a rule of life. St Monica and St Jerome are said to have visited the place, and William of Aquitaine (this, at least, seems a historical fact), whom Dante afterwards saw among the warriors of the Cross in the rosy sphere of Mars. "Our ancient hermitage," says Landucci, "was ever a sweet attraction for sanctity." Francis, the Seraphic Father of Assisi, came here too, and plucked from one of its ilexes the stick which he afterwards stuck into the ground at Capraia, and which grew up into a goodly tree. The place was originally known as the _Convento di Selva_, the Convent of the Wood, which was also called the _Selva di Lago_, because of the lake or swamp (afterwards drained) that lay at the foot of the hill. The name Lecceto is derived from the abundant ilex-trees which, though much reduced in numbers, are still one of the glories of the district. The golden age of the convent begins after 1256, when Pope Alexander IV. united all the Augustinian hermits into one order, and Lecceto became the head house of Tuscany. It produced an enormous number of _beati_, of whom Fra Filippo Agazzari, the pious novelist, and William Flete, St Catherine's correspondent, an Englishman who had settled here, are the only ones whose fame has penetrated beyond the boundaries of Tuscany. Wonderful legends linger round the convent and the forest, told with much vividness and simplicity by Fra Filippo, with much unction by Landucci. Angels are said to have descended in human form, to eat with the hermits in their refectory or to succour them in their needs; the flowers of this forest, when sent to other places, healed the sick and worked miracles, "all evident signs that here flourished a continual spring of Paradise." The Dominican Ambrogio Sansedoni, then a young knight, coming from Siena up through the wood to the convent (the very way in which we are treading now), was assailed by the fiend in the guise of a beautiful girl whom two ruffians had bound to a tree. The pious historian assures us that the knots had been tied by the Gordius of Hell to entangle Ambrogio's soul, but that, while he laboured to untie them, he discovered the snare and repulsed the foe by the sign of the Cross.[161]