Side by side we proceeded through the church of St. Clare, the Duomo, the new church raised on the site of the house that belonged to Pietro Bernardone, the father of the saint; and finally to the Church of San Damiano, where after St. Francis had seen the vision of the new life, he went to pray. After it was given him by the Benedictines he set about the work of repairing it and when once it was in charge of the poor Clares, after resigning the command of his order, he returned thither to rest and compose the “Canticle of the Law.” I never knew until I came to Assisi what a business this thing of religion is in Italy--how valuable the shrines and churches of an earlier day are to its communities. Thousands of travelers must pass this way each year. They support the only good hotels. Travelers from all nations come, English, French, German, American, Russian, and Japanese. The attendants at the shrines reap a small livelihood from the tips of visitors and they are always there, lively and almost obstreperous in their attentions. The oldest and most faded of all the guides and attendants throng about the churches and shrines of Assisi, so old and faded that they seemed almost epics of poverty. My good priest was for praying before every shrine. He would get down on his knees and cross himself, praying four or five minutes while I stood irreligiously in the background, looking at him and wondering how long he would be. He prayed before the tomb of St. Francis in the Franciscan church; before the body of St. Clare (clothed in a black habit and shown behind a glass case), in the church of St. Clare; before the altar in the chapel of Saint Damiano, where St. Francis had first prayed; and so on. Finally when we were all through, and it was getting late evening, he wanted to go down into the valley, near the railroad station, to the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, where the cell in which St. Francis died, is located. He thought I might want to leave him now, but I refused. We started out, inquiring our way of the monks at Saint Damiano and found that we had to go back through the town. One of the monks, a fat, bare-footed man, signaled me to put on my hat, which I was carrying because I wanted to enjoy the freshness of the evening wind. It had cleared off now, the sun had come out and we were enjoying one of those lovely Italian spring evenings which bring a sense of childhood to the heart. The good monk thought I was holding my hat out of reverence to his calling. I put it on.