However this may be, the monks of the Priory certainly had great privileges; one of them was that every year, at the Festival of St. Bartholomew, for three days they might hold a fair in the "smooth field" or Smithfield. Have you ever been to a country fair, and seen its funny little stalls of sweets and chinaware and its quaint shows? If you have, you must know that most English fairs are not at all important nowadays; but in the times of which I am writing most of the buying and selling in England was done at them. And so the old writer, Stow, tells us that to St. Bartholomew's Fair "the Clothiers of all England and Drapers of London repayred and had their boothes and standings within the churchyard of this priorie, closed in with walles, and gates locked every night, and watched for safetie of men's goodes and wares"--so rich and valuable was its merchandise. Year by year it was held until 1855; then it was done away with, for serious buying and selling were no longer carried on at such fairs, and "Bartlemy Fair," as it was called, was now famous only for its shows of wild beasts, dwarfs and giants, for its ox roasted whole, and for its scenes of wild merry-making. For four hundred years the monks of St. Bartholomew's tended the poor people of London. Then came the days when Henry VIII. broke up the monasteries; in 1539 he turned the monks out of the Priory and closed {32} the hospital. Presently I will tell you what afterwards happened to it. For the beginning of our second charity we must go far away from London to the little town of Assisi in Italy. There, on a spring day of the year 1209, a young man kneeling in a little church heard the priest reading the Gospel for the day:--"As ye go, preach, saying, 'The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.' Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers.... Provide neither silver nor gold nor brass in your purses, neither scrip nor two coats, nor shoes nor staff." The young man felt as though Christ Himself was speaking to him. "From henceforth," he said, "I shall set myself with all my might to live thus." ====================================================================== [Illustration: NO. 9. AN EXCITING GAME: OLD CHRIST'S HOSPITAL, LONDON] ====================================================================== If you had asked the people of Assisi about him, they would have answered you in some such words as these, "Yonder man? He is Francis, the spendthrift son of the cloth-merchant, Pietro Bernardone. He to make such a vow! he, the idle companion of the foolish young nobles of Assisi, the waster of his father's wealth! It is true he has changed of late, but his new way of life pleases his father not at all, for he has given away all he possessed, and says he has taken Poverty as his bride. He visits the lepers, and labours to repair some of the poor churches of the town."