After much delay the procession started. The road was indeed appalling! A narrow, steep, stony mountain path, over which no man in his senses would ever dream of driving a carriage. But what will not an Italian do when there is a chance of earning a few _lire_? In front, leading the bullocks, walked the woman with a shawl pushed well down over her forehead. She looked sufficiently modest and respectful, and was also sufficiently careless and untidy, to remind one of a Russian peasant woman. The thin useless little ropes she had brought broke every minute, the ends falling and getting entangled in the animals’ feet. Giuseppe was furious, constantly jumped off the box, and bitterly reproached the poor woman. At last the bullocks were unharnessed, the relieved horse trotted gaily along a wider and much smoother road, and Irene thought that her troubles were over. Alas, however! At a turn of the way appeared a peasant waiting with two other bullocks (white ones this time), and the same story began all over again. The road grew always worse and more dangerous, and Irene hardly knew whether to be more frightened or delighted with the wonderful view that greeted her gaze. Assisi, with its stone walls and towers, lay spread out before her like a fairy-fortress, with a background of blue hills, and surrounded by a frame of grey-green olive-trees and dark cypresses. In the foreground, like carpets flung down at random, gleamed brilliant patches of emerald grass—the whole picture, indeed, was so fresh, so lovely, so poetical, that it might have been torn from a masterpiece by Botticelli. At last the bullocks turned into a cavern-like opening among the rocks, from which issued a whiff of cold air. They had reached the entrance to the monastery, and Irene alighted and followed the path between two stone walls. A deathlike silence surrounded her. The sun caressed the as yet leafless old trees, birds sang, the path grew always narrower, and at last the old gates barred the way. Irene rang the bell. A decrepit old door-keeper, walking with difficulty, led her into a tiny courtyard with a stone well in its centre, and passed her on to a young Franciscan, just on the point of acting as guide to an Englishwoman who had come from Assisi on foot. The tiny retreat was arranged partly in natural grottos and partly in little cave-cells, hewn out of the rocks. The little staircases and doors were so narrow and low that one could nowhere stand upright. Here, in the twelfth century, lived, at times, St. Francis, and la sua compagnia; then, later on, St. Bernard of Siena, and many other saints. The poetic stillness of the place, and its sacred associations, had attracted them, and they had jealously guarded the few small relics of St. Francis that had been left there—a tiny narrow pillow, a little box for the Holy Sacrament, and a cross.