We have a fancy that there is a different moral atmosphere in a town surrounded by olive trees and one set in vineyards, the former being more sober and reserved, the latter more joyous and expansive.  The latter may, indeed, carry its spirit too far—­like the little city of Zagorolo near Rome, where the inhabitants are noted at the same time for the strength and excellence of their wines and for the quarrelsomeness of their dispositions.  Palestrina, a little way off on the hillside, with a flowing skirt of vines all about it, breathes laughter in its very air.  One may sit in Bernardini’s—­known to all visitors to the city of Fortune—­and hear the travellers who come there laugh over mishaps which they would have growled over anywhere else.  The comparison might be made of many other towns.

Asisi is set in a world of olives.  They swing like smoke from a censer all through the corn and grain of the plain; they roll up the hills and mountains, climbing the almost perpendicular heights like goats; they crawl through the ravines; they cover the tiny plateaus set between the crowded hills; and plantations of slim young trees are set through the city, bending like long feathers and turning a soft silver as the wind passes over them.  It is delightful to walk under the olive trees in early summer, when they hang full of strings of tiny cream-colored blossoms.  In winter these blossoms will have changed to a small black fruit.  The trees are as rugged as the roughest old apple trees, and many of them are supported only on a hollow half-circle of trunk or on two or three mere sticks.  One wonders how these slender fragments of trunk can support that spreading weight above, especially in wind and tempest, and how that wealth of blossom and fruit can draw sufficient sustenance through such narrow and splintered channels; but the olive is tough, and the oil that runs in its veins for blood keeps it ever vigorous.

True to my fancy—­which, indeed, it helped to nourish—­Asisi is a serious town.  It has even an air of gentle melancholy, which is not, however, depressing, but which inclines to thoughtfulness and study.  Travellers are familiar with its aspect—­the crowning citadel with the ring of green turf between it and the city, which stretches across the shoulders of the mountain, row above row of gray houses, with the magnificent pile of the church and convent of St. Francis at its western extremity, clasped to the steep rock with a hold that an earthquake could scarcely loosen.  Three long streets stretch from east to west, the central one a very respectable street, clean, well-paved, and delightfully quiet.  You may sit in a window there and hear nothing the livelong day but the drip of a fountain and the screaming of clouds of swallows, which are, without exception, the most impudent birds that can be imagined.  Annoyed one day by the persistent “peeping” of a swallow that had perched in a nook just outside my window, I leaned out and frightened him away with