The saint lifted worms out of the path lest they should be crushed, and during the winter frosts, for fear that the bees should die in the hive, he brought honey to them and the best wines that he could find. Near his cell at Portionuculo there was a fig-tree, and on the fig-tree lived a cicada. One day the Servant of God stretched out his hand and said, “Come to me, my sister Cicada”; and at once the insect flew upon his hand. And he said to it, “Sing, my sister Cicada, and praise thy Lord.” And having received his permission she sang her song. The biographies that were written without the inquisition into facts which we demand, gave a living idea of the man, not a photograph of his skeleton. What mattered if romance were mixed with truth when the total was true? We know St. Francis of Assisi as if he had been our next-door neighbour. It would have needed unbounded genius to invent such a character, and there was nothing to be gained by inventing it. The legends which represent him as one who consistently treated animals as creatures endowed with reason are in discord with orthodox teaching; they skirt dangerously near to heresy. Giordano Bruno was accused of having said that men and animals had the same origin; to hold such an opinion qualified you for the stake. But the Church that canonised Buddha under the name of St. Josephat has had accesses of toleration which must have made angels rejoice. Some think that Francis was at one time a troubadour, and troubadours had many links with those Manichæan heretics whom Catholics charged with believing in the transmigration of souls. This may interest the curious, but the doctrine of metempsychosis has little to do with the vocation of the Asiatic recluse as a beast-tamer, and St. Francis of Assisi was true brother to that recluse. He was the Fakeer or Dervish of the West. When the inherent mysticism in man’s nature brought the Dervishes into existence soon after Mohammed’s death, in spite of the Prophet’s well-known dislike for religious orders, they justified themselves by quoting the text from the Koran, “Poverty is my pride.” It would serve the Franciscan equally well. The begging friar was an anachronism in the religion of Islam as he is an anachronism in modern society, but what did that matter to him? He thought and he thinks that he will outlive both.