Putting on the rags of a beggar, St Francis went to Rome, where he sat among the mendicants before St Peter's. Then began the miraculous cures of lepers whose hands he kissed, and his many works of charity and healing. He extolled "holy poverty," and called poverty his "lady." When he saw a worm lying on the path, the compassionate saint removed it, so that it should not be trodden on by passers-by. The birds he called his brothers and sisters; he fed them, bade them sing or keep silence, and they obeyed him. All birds and beasts loved him; and he taught the birds to sing praises to their creator. St Francis was perhaps the first eminent Christian who showed pity and love for the lower animals. In the morass of Venice, he came upon a great company of singing-birds, and entering among them, caused them to sing lauds to the Almighty. St Francis taught asceticism to his followers, but it was the asceticism of joy rather than of grief and pain. The saint had in him the qualities of poet and artist as well as of pious mystic. He lived for a time the life of the luxurious, and found it profitless and hollow; he passed through the ordeal of the temptations that beset a young man born of wealthy parents. "The more thou art assailed by temptations, the more do I love thee," said the blessed St Francis to his friend Leo. "Verily I say unto thee that no man should deem himself a true friend of God, save in so far as he hath passed through many temptations and tribulations." Flung into the prison of Perugia, he rejoiced and sang, and when the vulgar threw dirt upon him and his friars, he did not resent their rudeness. Trudging bare-footed through Umbria, scantily clothed, and subsisting upon crusts offered by the charitable, St Francis set an example of the holiness of poverty which impressed the peasants and excited their veneration for the preacher and his gospel. He worked as a mason, repairing the decayed Church of St Damian, and preached a doctrine of labour and industry, forsaking all that he had so that he might reap the ample harvest of Divine blessing. In winter the saint would plunge into a ditch of snow, that he might check the promptings of carnal desire. He refused to live under a roof at Assisi, preferring a mere shelter of boughs, with the company of Brother Giles and Brother Bernard. A cell of wood was too sumptuous for him. As St Francis grew in holiness there appeared in him the stigmata of Christ's martyrdom. In his side there was the wound of the spear; in his hands and feet were the marks of the nails. St Bonaventura relates that after his death, the flesh of the saint was so soft that he seemed to have become a child again, and that the wound in the side was like a lovely rose. He died, according to this historian, in 1226, on the fourth day of October. His remains were interred in Assisi, and afterwards removed to "the Church built in his honour," in 1230.