the latter, infinitely beautiful and religious, full of quiet concentrated feeling.  We were none of us critics:  none of us had got beyond the stage when the sentiment of a work of art is what most affects our enjoyment of it; and we all confessed how much more impressive to us was this Transfiguration, with its three quiet spectators, than the world-famous one at the Vatican.  Although there are masterpieces of Perugino’s in nearly every great European collection, I cannot but think one must go to Perugia to appreciate fully the limpid clearness, the pensive, tranquil suavity, which reigns throughout his pictures in the countenances, the landscape, the atmosphere.

[Illustration:  TODI.]

We found it hard to rob Perugia even of a day for a pilgrimage to the tomb of Saint Francis at Assisi, yet could not leave the neighborhood without making it.  We took the morning-train for the little excursion, meaning to drive back, and crossed the Tiber for the first time on the downward journey at Ponte San Giovanni.  We got out at the station of Santa Maria degli Angeli, so named from the immense church built over the cell where Saint Francis lived and died and the little chapel where he prayed.  The Porzionuncula it was called, or “little share,” being all that he deemed needful for man’s abode on earth, and more than needful.  It was hither that he came in the heyday of youth, forsaking the house of his wealthy father, the love of his mother, a life of pleasure with his gay companions, and dedicated himself to poverty and preaching the word of God.  One of our party had said that she considered Saint Francis the author of much evil, and as having done irreparable harm to the Italian people in sanctifying dirt and idleness.  But apostles are not to be judged by the abuse of their doctrine; and although it cannot be denied that Saint Francis encouraged beggary by forbidding his followers to possess aught of their own, he enjoined that they should labor with their hands for several hours daily.  And to me it seemed as if out of Palestine there could be no spot of greater significance and sacredness to any Christian than this, where in a sanguinary and licentious age a young man suddenly broke all the bonds of self, and taught in his own person humility, renunciation and brotherly love as they had hardly been taught since his Master’s death.  The sternness of his personal self-denial is only equaled by his sweetness toward all living things:  not men alone, but animals, birds, fishes, the frogs, the crickets, shared his love, and were called brother and sister by him.  The great and instantaneous movement which he produced in his own time was no short-lived blaze of fanaticism, for its results have lasted from the twelfth century to our own; and although we may well believe that the day is past for serving Christ by going barefoot and living on alms, the spirit of Saint Francis’s doctrine, charity, purity, self-abnegation, might do as much for modern men as