country round, and when provisions were scarce they fasted. In return the nuns spun the grey stuff for the habits of the friars and the linen for their altars; and after St. Francis received the Stigmata, St. Clare fashioned sandals for him with space for the nails so that he might walk with more ease. Often the poor came to seek help at her hands, and many times the sick were tended in a little mud hut near her cell which she used as a hospital. Silently her life was passed, and to those who looked on from the outside perhaps it might have seemed of small avail compared with the very apparent results of St. Francis' endeavours to help his fellow creatures. But very quietly she was guiding the women of mediæval Italy towards higher aims, for even those who could not follow her into the cloister were aided in their lives at home by the thought of the pure-souled gentle nun of San Damiano. Not the least important part of her work was the womanly sympathy and help which she gave to St. Francis. He turned to her when in trouble, and it was she who encouraged him to continue preaching to the people when, at one time he thought that his vocation was to be a life of solitary prayer and not of constant contact with mankind. He counted on her prayers, and trusting in her counsel went forward once more to preach the words of redemption. From her lonely cell she watched his work with tender solicitude, and when blind and ill he came for the last time to San Damiano she tended to his wants in a little hut she erected for him not far from the convent whence, across the vineyard and olive grove which separated them, the first strains of his glorious Canticle to the Sun came to her one morning. Her gentle influence played an important part in his life, giving him a friendship which is one of the most beautiful things to dwell on in their lives. Some have sneered at its purity, and compared so ideal a connection to a commonplace mediæval tale of monk and nun; but it is degrading even to hint at such an ending to the love of these two for each other, and impossible to believe it after reading M. Sabatier's beautiful chapter on St. Clare, where he touches, in some of his most charming pages, upon a side of St. Francis' character that most biographers have but little understood.