Late in the evening of the 30th we happened to be at the Angeli when a new batch of pilgrims arrived, and for a long time we watched them reverently approach the Portiuncula on their knees, singing all the time the pilgrim's hymn with the ever-recurring refrain, "Evviva Maria e Chi la creò," which resounded through the church in long drawn nasal notes ending in a kind of stifled cry. There was something soothing in the plaintive, monotonous cadence as it reached us at the Garden of the Roses, where we had gone to breathe the cool air which blows across the open colonnade even on the hottest of summer days. We were listening to Father Bernardine's peaceful talk about St. Francis and the cicala which sang to him in the fig tree, and the lamb which followed the brethren to office, when suddenly we were startled by shrieks and screams in the church. "It is nothing, only the Neapolitans," said Father Bernardine, smiling at our distress. But unable longer to bear what sounded like the moanings of the wind which always fills one with uneasy feelings, half of fear, half of expectation that something unusual is going to happen, we hurried once again into the church. There a sight met our eyes which we shall never forget. Lying full length on the ground, their faces prone upon the pavement, were women crawling slowly, so slowly that the torture seemed interminable, from the entrance of the great church to the Portiuncula, and as they crawled they licked the floor with their tongues leaving behind them a mark like the trail of a slug. As we watched these poor penitents dragging themselves along, unconscious of aught around them and only overwhelmed by the consciousness that they must make atonement for past sins, a terrible sense of compassion, misery and disgust came over us. Who could restrain their tears, though they may have been tears of anger that people should be allowed to practise such ignoble acts of self-abasement. One girl especially called forth all our sympathy. She came running in out of the sunlight, and after standing for a moment at the entrance with her eager face uplifted towards the holy shrine, her eyes alight with the strange look of one bent upon some great resolve, she threw herself down full length upon the ground and commenced the terrible penance which she had come all the way from the Abruzzi mountains to perform.[114] She was very slight and her black skirt fell round her like a veil, showing the delicate outline of her figure against the marble pavement. Resting her naked feet against the knees of a man kneeling behind her, she pushed herself forward with the movement of a caterpillar. Another man tapped his pilgrim's staff sharply on the floor in front of her face to direct her towards the chapel, whilst her mother ever now and then bent down to smooth away the tangle of dark hair which fell round the girl like a shroud. Though prematurely aged by toil and suffering, the elder woman had a beautiful face,