_Chi lo sa._--The words brought up before our eyes a host of images: hedges and fields, woods and plains, green with the green of the May-time: white roads and poppy fields, the oak woods under Trevi, the ilex groves of Spoleto, the long low lines of shining Trasimene, the marshy shores of Chiusi; and still more fair and more romantic, the cool green stream of the Clitumnus flowing beneath the pagan temple of a Roman river god.... That was the vision we had learned to love and know, with no attempt to criticise, and it was all composed of natural things. Dimly in the past we saw another vision: our study at Perugia. Piles and piles of manuscripts were there; books and maps, and guides, pamphlets, chronicles and histories--the records of men's doings, one and all. * * * * * What about all this history, these interminable records of building and of quarrelling, of burying and strife? What in fact about all these Perugian P's:--_Persecuzione_, _Protezione_, _Processione_; Popes, people, painters, and _Priori_? What had all these persons done to touch or trammel permanently the eternal smile of Umbrian nature through which we had been passing? Surely there were lovers who, amongst the savage bands of men who skirmished down the hill across the plains in order to insult or to offend their neighbours, stopped to snatch a white rose from the hedges where they grew in thousands? And there were women, young and pure and peaceful, ignorant of the Pope, indifferent to the Baglioni, who waited for them in their homes--women with the faces of Bonfigli's angels, Bonfigli's roses, maybe, twisted in their hair?... With dim delight we realised that whatever the doings of the past may have been in Umbria as elsewhere, the microscopic scratches made by him through centuries upon the calm smooth breast of Nature have now all turned to a delicate adornment. The war and the strife, the hurrying and skurrying to power have vanished utterly. Man's work is there: wonderful little cities of men made one with Nature now; frescoes fading into death around the quiet altars of forgotten churches, fortresses and wells and city walls, bridges and the tombs of vanished nations; new buildings rising here and there upon the old, new people praying or parading, where the old had fought and prayed. But above them all the balm of sun and rain, of rivers, lakes and water-courses doing their work. * * * * *