Beyond a wide space on the other side of the grill was a fine wire netting, so heavy that only a shade, a brush of a veil, a suggestion of a smile could penetrate. A soft sound came through the blackness, and a voice unthinkably sweet said: “_Buenos días, Rosa mía_.” It was the Sister Margarita, who had been thirty years behind those bars without a glimpse of friends, buried to the evils of the world, consecrated to Santa Rosa. The voice began to speak. “Our glorious Rosa! Let me tell you that when she was only three years old the lid of a heavy chest fell upon her thumb. She looked up at her mother and smiled. She concealed stinging herbs in her gloves, and when visitors came, she rubbed pepper into her eyes, so that she could neither see them nor think of what they were saying. _Rosa santísima!_ “When she sang to her garden the canticle: ‘O all ye green things of the earth, bless ye the Lord,’ the trees clapped their leaves together, and even the vegetables lifted up murmurs of praise. She invented hymns to the Virgin and sang them antiphonally with a bird, though she was often surprised at being able to understand the speech of unbaptized beings. One day in the garden a black and white butterfly hovered above her. Thenceforth she understood that it was decreed that she should enter the order of Saint Dominicus. Her life from that time on was a series of acts of self-mortification. _Rosa inocentísima!_ “She divided her day into twelve hours of prayer, ten hours of millinery work, and two hours of sleep. She was constantly aware of the presence of the angels. _Rosa purísima!_ “At sixteen she entered the sisterhood. She prayed to a picture of Christ until it broke into a sweat. She prepared clothing for the infant Jesus by prayer--fifty litanies, nine hundred rosaries, and five days of fasting made him a little garment; and for toys, she said: ‘I give my tears, my sighs, my heart, and soul.’ “She wore a belt lined with nails, which she locked about her, and threw the key down a well. Half the nail belt is in the Santuario of Santa Rosa, where the well was. It went dry on the day of her death. “She died here in ecstasy on this very spot at the age of thirty. _Rosa gloriosísima!_” I spoke with the voice. I asked about Santa Rosa’s shrine with its thousands of little silver _ex-votos_ in Santo Domingo. “Yes, that is where she lies buried, except once a year on the thirtieth of August, when she journeys to the cathedral and back. “The daughter of a viceroy once climbed out of a palace window at night to take the veil of Santa Rosa. “When the Pope was deliberating her canonization, he was overwhelmed by a rain of roses; when it was finally celebrated, the streets of Lima were paved with silver bars. “In 1720, when they dug to build her convent, a strong odor of roses emanated from the ground.