As the sun was sinking this Saturday, the bells in the tower of the principal church began an unwonted clangor, and I was told that the Squadrito relatives had paid for a special service at vespers for the safe journey and prosperity of our party. As we wound along our way to the village we could see little groups of people, some in holiday dress, and others, for the most part, in the clothes in which they left the fields, the wine-presses, the cheese-shops, the smithies and the orchards. As we entered the square we met one of the priests, a benign old man, one of the truest and best types of the sincere rural clergy I have ever seen. After taking a pinch of snuff, he offered the box to me with a quizzical smile, knowing full well the un-Americanism of snuff. There was a hasty exchange of compliments and well-wishes, then he passed on to the sacristy. Jules Breton has caught and put on canvas, more than once, the spirit of peasant piety which pervaded that vespers; the air of restful, provincial, old-world religious fixity, breathing through the richly colored and wonderfully picturesque scene in that ancient church. Around the tallow-encrusted base of the figure of San Francesco, the patron saint of the village, flared the great yellow candles. A few glimmered on the altar. The figure stood on a pedestal a little to one side of the centre of the church. To the left, kneeling on the worn stones of the floor, or sitting on tiny rush-bottomed chairs, were the closely grouped women, some few in the coveted black-lace prayer-shawls, but the mass in the solid-colored commoner ones, drawn over the head and spreading out into a cone around the kneeling or sitting figure. These shawls, dark red, green, or yellow, treasured among the poor, made that night in the candle-light a softened color-scheme that is indescribable. To the right were the men and boys, clad for the most part in the baggy homespun worn in the fields, though here and there some villager boasted a suit from the tailor’s hands. As we entered, an old man with furrowed face, horn spectacles and raucous voice, and a slender, Raphael-faced boy, both in vestments, were chanting from well-thumbed books held into the light of the candles about the saint’s figure. Overhead in the choir the old organ toiled uncertainly through the music of the service, and ever and anon the boy took up and rang the tinkling silver bell. His clear, superb soprano voice was in fine contrast with that of the elder singer, but the whole scene, the portion of the service at the altar, the muffled murmur of the people repeating the forms, the rustle and stir as they knelt or rose, the shifting of the shadows on the wall, was all so strange, almost barbaric, yet so harmonious and beautiful that its very detail was evasive.