Lady Georgiana Fullerton, in her “Life of Santa Francesca Romana,” has described very truly and sympathetically these—to us—puzzling stages in the development of saintship. They vary in degree, of course, in each individual case, but the same note runs through all: “Permission to labour first,—the result far distant, but clear; the vision of that result when once He had said, ‘Begin and work.’ To tarry patiently for that signal, to obey it unhesitatingly when once given, is the rule of the Saints. How marvellous is their instinct! how accordant their practice! First, the hidden life, the common life; the silence of the house of Nazareth; the carpenter’s shop; the marriage-feast, it may be, for some; and, at last, ‘the hour is come,’ and the true work for which they are sent into the world has to be done, in the desert or in the cloister, in the temple or in the market-place, on Mount Tabor or on Mount Calvary; and the martyr or the confessor, the founder or the reformer of a religious order, comes forth, and in an instant, or in a few years, performs a work at which earth wonders and angels rejoice.” CHAPTER IX PEOPLE OF THE HILLS The Apennines—View from a Peak—Real Hospitality—Polenta—Woods of Sabina—A Hill Family—The Cook—A Queer Adventure—People of the South—A Night Festival in the Abruzzi—The Journey—The Old Organ—Marion Crawford’s Boys—Juvenile Theatricals. How much our Italy of Rome and Naples owes to the Apennines! How gratefully should lovers of romance and history regard that mighty chain that runs, an inland sea of crag and peak, forest and ravine, between shore and shore! Physically and morally, it is the backbone of the country, the fortress of tradition, the nurse of what our modern cant calls, “Plain living and high thinking.” Its hard, yet beneficent, climate, with sharp delimitations of season, its passes so obdurate to the tainting allurements of railways, its hundreds of sturdy, self-contained little towns, each with its story of its own saints and heroes, its ancestry of tradition that laughs at the flight of centuries—all this has bred a race of men and women of whom modern Italy knows little, but who form the residue by which the mixed enfeebled masses of her cities and plains will in the end be saved. Faith is strong; morals, though often transgressed, still clear and commanding. New fads, make-believe religions, free love and race suicide presented as twin benefits to humanity, the worship of materialism—all the old crimes that come dressed up as new virtues—find no foothold here. The “pale-pink uplift” of these modern shams would be laughed to scorn by our people of Sabina and Abruzzi and Ciocciarìa. Their parish priests tramp round amongst them as friends and mentors. The “parroco” and the apothecary may be the only persons in a whole community who can read, but the child of ten knows the commandments of God and the Church, and the innovator who attempts to make little