As I came up in the bus, looking after my very un-St. Francis-like luggage, and my precious fur overcoat, I encountered a pale, ascetic-looking French priest,--“L’Abbé Guillmant, Vicar General, Arras (Pas-de-Calais), France;” he wrote out his address for me,--who, looking at me over his French Baedeker every now and then, finally asked in his own tongue, “Do you Speak French?” I shook my head deprecatingly and smiled regretfully. “Italiano?” Again I had to shake my head. “C’est triste!” he said, and went on reading. He was clad in a black cassock that reached to his feet, the buttons ranging nicely down his chest, and carried only a small portmanteau and an umbrella. We reached the hotel and I found that he was stopping there. Once on the way up he waved his hand out of the window and said something. I think he was indicating that we could see Perugia further up the valley. In the dining-room where I found him after being assigned to my room he offered me his bill-of-fare and indicated that a certain Italian dish was the best. This hotel to which we had come was a bare little affair. It was new enough--one of Cook’s offerings,--to which all the tourists traveling under the direction of that agency are sent. The walls were quite white and clean. The ceilings of the rooms were high, over high latticed windows and doors. My room, I found, gave upon a balcony which commanded the wonderful sweep of plain below. The dining-room contained six or seven other travelers bound either southward towards Rome or northward towards Perugia and Florence. It was a rather hazy day, not cold and not warm, but cheerless. I can still hear the clink of the knives and forks as the few guests ate in silence or conversed in low tones. Travelers in this world seem almost innately fearsome of each other, particularly when they are few in number and meet in some such out-of-the-way place as this. My Catholic Abbé was longing to be sociable with me, I could feel it; but this lack of a common tongue prevented him, or seemed to. As I was leaving I asked the proprietor to say to him that I was sorry that I did not speak French, that if I did I would be glad to accompany him; and he immediately reported that the Abbé said, Would I not come along, anyhow? “He haav ask,” said the proprietor, a small, stout, dark man, “weel you not come halong hanyhow?” “Certainly,” I replied. And so the Abbé Guillmant and I, apparently not understanding a word of each other’s language, started out sightseeing together--I had almost said arm-in-arm. I soon learned that while my French priest did not speak English, he read it after a fashion, and if he took plenty of time he could form an occasional sentence. It took time, however. He began,--in no vivid or enthusiastic fashion, to be sure,--to indicate what the different things were as we went along.