I wonder if there is any one who can read this without a thrill of response. This world sets such store by wealth and comfort. We all batten on luxury so far as our means will permit,--many of us wallow in it; and the thought of a man who could write such a prayer as that, and live it, made my hair tingle to the roots. I can understand Pope Innocent III’s saying that the rule offered by St. Francis and his disciples to ordinary mortals was too severe, but I can also conceive the poetic enthusiasm of a St. Francis. I found myself on the instant in the deepest accord with him, understanding how it was that he wanted his followers not to wear a habit, and to work in the fields as day-laborers, begging only when they could not earn their way. The fact that he and his disciples had lived in reed huts on the site of Santa Maria degli Angeli, the great church which stands in the valley near the station, far down from the town, and had practised the utmost austerity, came upon me as a bit of imaginative poetry of the highest sort. Before the rumbling bus arrived, which conveyed me and several others to the little hotel, I was thrilling with enthusiasm for this religious fact, and anything that concerned him interested me. In some ways Assisi was a disappointment because I expected something more than bare picturesqueness; it is very old and I fancy, as modern Italy goes, very poor. The walls of the houses are for the most part built of dull gray stone. The streets climbed up hill and down dale, hard, winding, narrow, stony affairs, lined right to the roadway by these bare, inhospitable-looking houses. No yards, no gardens--at least none visible from the streets, but, between walls, and down street stairways, and between odd angles of buildings the loveliest vistas of the valley below, where were spread great orchards of olive trees, occasional small groups of houses, distant churches and the mountains on the other side of the valley. Quite suited to the self-abnegating spirit of St. Francis, I thought,--and I wondered if the town had changed greatly since his day--1182!