At the time the traveller appeared, the former hermit had just departed this life, and it was, therefore, to the vacancy thus occasioned that he had procured himself to be elected. The incumbent appeared quite of a different mould from the former occupants of the hermitage. He accepted, it is true, the gifts laid at regular periods upon a huge stone between the hermitage and the well, but he distributed among the donors alms far more profitable than their gifts. He entered no village, borne upon an ass laden with twin sacks, for the purpose of sanctimoniously robbing the inhabitants; no profane songs were ever heard resounding from his dwelling by the peasant incautiously lingering at a late hour too near its vicinity; my guide, the monk, complained bitterly of his unsociability, and no scandalous legend of nymph-like comforters and damsel visitants haunting the sacred dwelling escaped from the garrulous friar’s well-loaded budget. “Does he study much?” said I, with the interest of a student. “I fear me not,” quoth the monk. “I have had occasion often to enter his abode, and I have examined all things with a close eye,--for, praised be the Lord, I have faculties more than ordinarily clear and observant,--but I have seen no books therein, excepting a missal, and a Latin or Greek Testament, I know not well which; nay, so incurious or unlearned is the holy man that he rejected even a loan of the ‘Life of Saint Francis,’ notwithstanding it has many and rare pictures, to say nothing of its most interesting and amazing tales.” More might the monk have said, had we not now suddenly entered a thick and sombre wood. A path cut through it was narrow, and only capable of admitting a traveller on foot or horseback; and the boughs overhead were so darkly interlaced that the light scarcely, and only in broken and erratic glimmerings, pierced the canopy. “It is the wood,” said the monk, crossing himself, “wherein the wonderful adventure happened to Saint Francis, which I will one day narrate at length to you.” “And we are near the well, I suppose?” said I. “It is close at hand,” answered the monk.