There are other things to be seen at Assisi; and after dining at the little Albergo del Leone, which, like every part of the town except the churches, is remarkably clean, my companion set out to climb up to the castle, and I wandered back to the great church.  As I sat idly on the steps a monk accosted me, and finding that I had not seen the convent, carried me through labyrinthine corridors and galleries, down long flights of subterranean stone steps, one after another, until I thought we could not be far from the centre of the earth, when he suddenly turned aside into a vast cloister with high arched openings and led me to one of them.  Oh, the beauty, the glory, the wonder of the sight!  We were halfway down the mountain-side, hanging between the blue heaven and the billowy Umbrian plain, with its verdure and its azure fusing into tints of dreamy softness as they vanished in the deep violet shadows of thick-crowding mountains, on whose surfaces and gorges lay changing colors of the superbest intensity.  Poplars and willows showed silvery among the tender green of other deciduous trees in their fresh spring foliage and the deep velvet of the immortal cypresses and the blossoming shrubs, which looked like little puffs of pink and white cloud resting on the bosom of the valley.  A small, clear mountain-stream wound round the headland to join the Tiber, which divides the landscape with its bare, pebbly bed.  It was almost the same view that one has from twenty places in Perugia, but coming out upon it as from the bowels of the earth, framed in its huge stone arch, it was like opening a window from this world into Paradise.

Slowly and lingeringly I left the cloister, and panted up the many steps back to the piazza to await my companion and the carriage which was to take us back to Perugia.  The former was already there, and in a few minutes a small omnibus came clattering down the stony street, and stopping beside us the driver informed us that he had come for us.  Our surprise and wrath broke forth.  Hours before we had bespoken a little open carriage, and it was this heavy, jarring, jolting vehicle which they had sent to drive us ten miles across the hills.  The driver declared, with truly Italian volubility and command of language and gesture, that there was no other means of conveyance to be had; that it was excellent, swift, admirable; that it was what the signori always went from Assisi to Perugia in; that, in fine, we had engaged it, and must take it.  My companion hesitated, but I had the advantage here, being the one who could speak Italian; so I promptly replied that we would not go in the omnibus under any circumstances.  The whole story was then repeated with more adjectives and superlatives, and gestures of a form and pathos to make the fortune of a tragic actor.  I repeated my refusal.  He began a third time:  I sat down on the steps, rested my head on my hand and looked at the carvings of the portal.  This drove him to frenzy: