orchards near of peaches and almonds. There is a great charm in the brown, weather-beaten convent, though a certain sadness when we remember, in looking at its tiny windows like holes in the wall through which only narrow vistas of the beautiful valley can be seen, how changed must be the lives of these cloistered nuns from those of the Poor Ladies of San Damiano in the time of St. Clare. They are now an order of the orthodox type, an order given to prayer and not to labour, and seeing no human face from the outside world except through an iron grating. So early as 1267 their connection with the franciscan brotherhood ceased; the brethren no longer heard their confessions or begged for them through the land as St. Francis had decreed; they lived under the patronage of the Pope, who declared their convent to be under the especial jurisdiction of the Holy See, and on the feast of St. Francis called upon the nuns to send a pound of wax candles in sign of tribute. As the Pope had often in olden times become master of Assisi so now he obtained the rule over her monastic institutions, gaining the temporal allegiance of the religious, as he had gained that of the citizens. [Illustration: SANTA CHIARA] Upon entering the church of Santa Chiara out of the sunshine, we are struck with a sense of the coldness of its scant ornamentation, a want of colour, and a general idea that artists in first directing their steps to San Francesco had not had time to give much thought to the church of the gentle saint. Giottino is said by Vasari to have painted frescoes here, and they may be those ruined bits of colour in the right transept where it is only possible to distinguish a few heads or parts of figures here and there in what seems to be a procession, perhaps the Translation of St. Clare from San Damiano to San Giorgio. It is said that their present condition of ruin is due to the German bishop Spader who, fearing that the nuns might see too much of the world through the narrow grating because of the number of people who came to see the frescoes, had them whitewashed in the seventeenth century. The people came less, the nuns were safer, but Giottino's (?) frescoes are lost to us and we do not bless the memory of the German bishop of Assisi. The frescoes of the ceiling he did not touch, and we have in them some interesting work of an artist of the fourteenth century whose name is unknown, but who undoubtedly followed the Giottesque traditions, though not with the fidelity or the genius of the artist who painted the legend of St. Nicholas in San Francesco. In decorating the four spandrels he has been influenced by the allegories of Giotto, and the angels are grouped round the principal figures in much the same manner; they kneel, some with hands crossed upon their breasts, but they are silent worshippers with not a single instrument among them. The saints who stand in the midst of the angels in Gothic