Assisi is the only town we know of in Italy where the interest does not centre round its cathedral and a certain sadness is felt, which perhaps is not difficult to explain; St. Francis holds all in his spell now just as he held the people long ago, so that the saints who first preached Christianity to the Assisans, were martyred and brought honour to the city, are almost forgotten and their churches deserted. The citizens, though proud of their Duomo, with its beautiful brown façade, hardly appear to love it, and we have often thought that they too feel the sense of gloom and isolation in the small piazza, which makes it a place ill-fitted to linger in for long. Men come and go so silently, women fill their pitchers at the fountain but only the splashing of water is heard, and they quickly disappear down a street; even the houses have no life, for while the windows are open no one looks out, and the total absence of flowers gives them a further look of desolation. This part of the town was already old in mediæval times, and the far away mystery of an age which has few records still lives around the cathedral and its bell tower. San Rufino stands in the very centre of Roman Assisi and its history begins very soon after the Roman era, one might say was contemporary with it, as the saint whose name it bears, was martyred in the reign of Diocletian. All the details of his death, together with the charming legend about the building of the cathedral, come down to us in a hymn by St. Peter Damian, who, although writing in 1052 of things which it is true happened long before, had very likely learnt the traditions about it from the Assisans while he lived in his mountain hermitage near Gubbio. The story goes back to the time when the Roman consul of Assisi received orders to stamp out the fast-spreading roots of Christianity, and began his work by putting to death St. Rufino, the pastor of the tiny flock. The soldiers hurried the Bishop down to the river Chiaggio and, after torturing him in horrible fashion, flung him into the water with a heavy stone round his neck. Some say that the Emperor Diocletian came in person to see his orders carried out. That night the Assisan Christians stole down to the valley to rescue the body of their Bishop and place it in safety within the castle of Costano, which still stands in the fields close to the river but almost hidden by the peasant houses built around it. Here, in a marble sarcophagus he rested, cared for and protected by each succeeding generation of Christians who had learned from tradition to love his memory, and secretly they visited the castle in the plain to pray by the tomb of the martyred saint. Their vigilance continued until the fifth century, when the Christians had already begun to burn the Pagan temples and build churches of their own. Christianity, indeed, spread so rapidly throughout Umbria that other towns cultivated a love for relics, and fearing that the body of St.