And thus the monk dreams on about the Seraphic Province of Umbria; and we dream with him of the Umbrians who forsook the chase and their shepherd huts on the heights about Subasio, to gather round the marvellous temple built by the hero ere he went forth to found the city of Troy. People came from afar to look at the six-fluted columns, and while marvelling at a thing so fair, they resolved to build their homes within sight and under the shadow of the sacred walls. Here was the nucleus of a future town. The simple shelters of cane and brushwood were soon replaced by huts of a neater pattern made of wattle and clay, with earthen floors, rounded porches and pent roofs. The dwellers by the temple throve and prospered, and all was peace for a while, until the van-guard of that mysterious people, the Etruscans, appeared on the Umbrian horizon. We are told how Dardanus, while visiting the King of Lydia on his way to Troy, drew such a highly-coloured picture of the loveliness of Tuscany, the fruitful qualities of the soil, and the lightness of the air, that Tyrrhenus, the king's son, was immediately sent with a large army to take possession of so rich a province. Then came a struggle, and the Umbrian tribes were driven back south of the Tiber, which henceforth strictly defined the boundary between Umbria and Etruria. Immediately to the west of Assisi, and on the longest spur of hills which juts out into the valley of the Tiber, stood the now Etruscan city of Perugia, to which a band of Etruscans had lately immigrated. The huge, grim walls which grew up round it after the advent of the new settlers, the narrow pointed gateways, some guarded by heads of stern and unknown deities, the general menacing and ferocious aspect of its buildings, soon warned the smaller Umbrian cities of what they might in coming ages expect from her inhabitants. It is probable that skirmishes were frequent between the neighbouring towns of Assisi and Perugia, and to judge from the subterranean passages which still exist beneath the streets of the former place, we may gather that she was open to constant attacks, and that her inhabitants found it more prudent to disappear underground at the approach of enemies than to meet them in open battle. These subterranean galleries, cut in the soft tufa, extend for miles under the present city: branching out in all directions they form a veritable labyrinth of secret passages. Here swiftly and silently as the foe advanced, men and women with their children would disappear into the bowels of the earth, some being occasionally buried beneath masses of soil shaken down by the tramp of many feet above them. Repeated dangers of this sort at last decided the Assisans to meet their enemies in more war-like fashion, and to surround themselves--as Perugia had done--with stones and mortar. Soon the town bristled with towers and turreted gateways, and the houses, no longer built of wattle and mud, began to foreshadow the