_Sabatier has written a life of Francis, at once scholarly, judicious and vivid, but as the Franciscan Father remarked, he wrote the life of Mr. Francis. If you would learn of Saint Francis of blessed memory, you must study by yourself with loving diligence a childish old book which tells of the miracles wrought through the tail of Saint Francis—“The Little Flowers of Saint Francis.” The fruits of history others may put before us, but the passing fragrance of the flowers we must perceive for ourselves._ _I here submit for your interpretation certain incidents that seem to me the outgrowth of the fine feeling of the impulsive Moyen Age._ FLOWERS FROM MEDIÆVAL HISTORY _Flowers of History From the Romantic Thirteenth Century_ I have borrowed my title from a Thirteenth Century chronicle, of disputed authorship, purporting to be a history of the world, but from 447 A. D. on it is engrossed with the story of England. From this insular partiality of its author I should be inclined to award the work to the English claimant, for what is a flower of history but a phase of the human story which especially charms the writer. To me the Gothic cathedrals are the flowers of Thirteenth Century history, which era saw every one of the greatest of them building. Their cornerstones may have been laid earlier, and the finishing touches came much later, but they owe their character to that one wonderful century which stands apart through the ages, thus telling its beads. The written history of the Thirteenth Century is cruel reading, but an age, like a man, has two soul sides, and the better side is always the harder to fathom. The Thirteenth Century opened for France, the native land of the Gothic, with an abominable pope, a selfish king and, nearer at hand, the evil of various tyrannical seigneurs. The great social movement which endowed the French towns with their magnificent cathedrals was apart from those powers and hardly affected by their war or peace. These great edifices were built by the secular clergy and the townspeople for municipal, as well as religious, purposes. Therein they held councils for deliverance from their feudal lords, lay and ecclesiastic, for in the Thirteenth Century the Third Estate became a political power. The cathedrals express the patriotism, generosity and civic pride of the freemen of the old towns; they realize the dream of the socialist for the good and the beautiful held in common; the love of the poet for beauty for its own sweet self; and the inspiration of the artist, working at the white heat of a rising art, as surely as the reverence of the age of faith. [Illustration: _The Crucifix, the Eternal Warning, Built into the Very Walls of the Old Courtroom in the Town Hall of Rouen._]