It was May, the month of Mary. The people from the town came pouring in for benediction. They were nearly all of them very poor people, the men haggard with perpetual labour in the fields,[129] quiet and eager even when very old; the girls fair, slim, colourless, their shawls too well defining the slender slope of their thin shoulders; the children brown and fascinating, and the older women lost in prayer. (We have noticed that the veriest hags in Umbria seem to pray as though they fully realised the sins of their forefathers, and felt the present generation needed all their prayers.) Peace and poverty were the two things which were stamped most clearly on the faces of the congregation. The priests themselves looked poor and worn, shorn of their fat homes and privileges. There were not many candles on the altar and these they lighted slowly one by one. Then they begun to sing a long low wailing chaunt in praise of Mary. It had thundered and rained since morning. The day died out in an orange glow which filtered through the hedges on the road outside and fell through the door of the church, gilding, as though with the softness of a vision, the groups of tired people. It rested with a wonderful radiance on the faded fresco above the chapel where we sat.[130] In all the country round, it would have been difficult to find a scene more steeped in the spirit of pastoral Umbria than this one: the half-ruined church, the graceful tired people, the thin priests, and the faded fresco of Perugino; the whole saved from squalor by the splendour of the sunlight on the land outside the door. We opened a book which we had carried with us on our journey and read the following lines: "Oh! qui nous délivrera du mal de science! N'est-ce point folie d'avoir étouffé à grand peine tous les meilleurs instincts de notre être, pour obéir à la mode du jour et nous faire une âme critique! Adieu les beaux enthousiasmes! On n'ose plus aimer la vérité d'aujourd'hui depuis qu'on ne sait jamais qu'elle sera celle de demain! Il y, a des erreurs dont on ne peut se consoler. Quelle pitié de s'être prosterné tant de fois avec toutes les tendresses de son âme croyante devant un escalier vermoulu que des moines trompeurs exhibaient depuis des siècles comme ayant abrité la sainte pénitence d'un saint Alexis qui n'a jamais existé! Ne donnons plus jamais notre coeur à la vérité! Promenons sur les choses et les hommes l'eternel sourire de notre indifférence moqueuse. C'est là qu' est le plaisir et le charme de la saine critique. Tout sera parfait quand les histoires commenceront et finiront par ce gai refrain _Chi lo sa_."[131] * * * * *