It was indeed! A fine appetite I should have had for my breakfast, at that moment awaiting me, if I had had to reflect over it that the great bell of the great basilica of St. Francis of Asisi had that very morning been cracked into pieces by my fore finger! What visions of horrified crowds of _Asisinati_, of black storms of newspaper items, of censuring gossip the world over, would have come between me and that purple pigeon smothered in rice which Maria had promised me! The pope himself would have known me individually out of the cloud of his subjects, and have frowned upon my image. And how it would have been whispered behind me to the end of my days, "That is the lady who broke the great bell of St. Francis"! But I had not broken it, and it still hangs sound and strong, to send its melancholy sweet music out to meet the centuries as they roll in storm and sunshine over the eastern mountains. Let us be thankful for the evils which might have happened and did not. I cannot resist the temptation to relate a little incident concerning this same learned Professor Cristofani, it struck me as so quaint. He is a poor man--literature, and even teaching, do not pay very well in Italian paesi--and he has a family. Cheaply as servants may be employed, he could not afford one, and his wife was not very well. Last summer the _Alpinisti_ visited Asisi, and some of the principal members, having an introduction to him, wished to visit him. Their stay in Asisi was short, and, being sunrise-and-mountain-top people, they made their call at six o'clock in the morning on their way to the top of Mount Asio, from which Asisi takes its name, and, I may here add, the correct spelling of its name, which I have followed. A servant from the Leone Hotel showed the visitors to the house, and very stupidly knocked at the kitchen-door. A loud "_Avanti!_" from within answered the knock. The door was opened by the guide, revealing a tableau. The professor, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up and an apron tied on, was earnestly kneading a mass of dough preparatory to sending it to the baker's oven, where everybody bakes their bread, and his pretty blonde young daughter was making coffee at the kitchen fire. "Well, I am a poor man, and my wife was sick," he said afterward, in telling the story, with a sad smile in his eyes, which are as blue and almost as blind as violets.