After seventeen years of unselfish labor for the poor and suffering, varied by the study of which we have the fruit, Paula died and was laid away in the grotto at Bethlehem. In her last moments she replied in Greek to a question of St. Jerome, that she felt no pain, and that everything before her was calm and tranquil. All Palestine flocked to her funeral, which was conducted by the Bishop of Jerusalem, and people of every rank and grade looked with tears on her grave and majestic features. “Illustrious by birth,” says St. Jerome, “more illustrious by her piety, first in Rome by the wealth of her house, then more honored by Christian poverty, she scorned pomp and glory, exchanged gilded walls for a cabin, and won the esteem of the entire world.” Her mantle fell upon Eustochium, an earnest, sincere woman of serious education but less strength and individuality than her mother, who filled her place with dignity and ability for sixteen years. In the first days of his grief St. Jerome was unable to take up his work, but this sympathetic helper turned his thoughts by carrying to him the Book of Ruth to be translated. At her death she was succeeded by her niece, another Paula, who had been long associated with her. The younger Melania, who had followed in the footsteps of her own grandmother, the first woman to leave Rome for an ascetic retreat in the East, was there also, and it was these women who, not long afterward, closed the eyes of St. Jerome, already dimmed with age. But the close of Marcella’s life came some time before this last light went out in the Syrian monastery, and it was tragical enough. For thirty years she had devoted herself and her large wealth to the unfortunate, and to the interests of the church she loved. During the siege of Alaric and the terrible days that saw the ruin of Rome, she was beaten and tortured to compel her to tell where she had hidden her treasures; but these had all gone for the relief of the suffering, and there was nothing to tell. A soldier with a kinder heart than the rest helped her to reach the old Church of St. Paul without the walls, together with Principia, the only companion left to her, whom she had saved with great difficulty from the fury of her brutal captors. A few days later she died of these tortures, and the maiden was left alone to tell the tale. The Ecclesia Domestica appears no more in history. The little group of devoted women was already scattered. Many were dead. Some had found refuge in the convent at Bethlehem, some in the cells of the Thebaid, and some had gone to carry the seeds of their faith to remote places where we cannot trace them. Strictly speaking, this was never a convent, as there were no vows and women went in and out at pleasure. But it has been called the “Mother of Convents.” V