"It happened that when he was residing with forty of his friars in the convent of Sta. Sabina at Rome, the brothers who had been sent to beg for provisions had returned with a very small quantity of bread, and they knew not what they should do, for night was at hand, and they had not eaten all day. Then St. Dominic ordered that they should seat themselves in the refectory, and, taking his place at the head of the table, he pronounced the usual blessing: and behold! two beautiful youths clad in white and shining garments appeared amongst them; one carried a basket of bread, and the other a pitcher of wine, which they distributed to the brethren: then they disappeared, and no one knew how they had come in, nor how they had gone out. And the brethren sat in amazement; but St. Dominic stretched forth his hand, and said calmly, 'My children, eat what God hath sent you:' and it was truly celestial food, such as they had never tasted before nor since."--_Jameson's Monastic Orders_, p. 369. Other saints who sojourned for a time in this convent were St. Norbert, founder of the Premonstratensians (ob. 1134), and St. Raymond de Penaforte (ob. 1275), who left his labours in Barcelona for a time in 1230 to act as chaplain to Gregory IX. In 1287 a conclave was held at Sta. Sabina for the election of a successor to Pope Martin IV., but was broken up by the malaria, six cardinals dying at once within the convent, and all the rest taking flight except Cardinal Savelli, who would not desert his paternal home, and survived by keeping large fires constantly burning in his chamber. Ten months afterwards his perseverance was rewarded by his own election to the throne as Honorius IV. In the garden of the convent are some small remains of the palace of the Savelli pope, Honorius III. Here, on the declivity of the Aventine, many important excavations were made in 1856--57, by the French Prior Besson, a person of great intelligence, and he was rewarded by the discovery of an ancient Roman house--its chambers paved with black and white mosaic, and some fine fragments of the wall of Servius Tullius, formed of gigantic blocks of peperino. In the chambers which were found decorated in stucco with remnants of painting in figures and arabesque ornaments, "one little group represented a sacrifice before the statue of a god, in an ædicula. Some rudely scratched Latin lines on this surface led to the inference that this chamber, after becoming subterranean and otherwise uninhabitable, had served for a prison; one unfortunate inmate having inscribed curses against those who caused his loss of liberty; and another, more devout, left record of his vows to sacrifice to Bacchus in case of recovering that blessing."[188]