my handkerchief.  He darted down to a little olive-plantation below, and a minute after up came a score or two of swallows and began flying round in a circle directly before my window, screaming like little demons.  Now and then one would dart out of the circle and make a vicious dip toward my face, with the evident wish to peck my eyes out, so that I was glad to draw back.  It reminded me of the famous circular battery which attacked one of the Confederate forts during our civil war, and it was quite as well managed.

The vetturino whom we took from the station up to the town on our arrival told me, when I gave my address, that the Sor Filomena had gone away from Asisi, and I had better go to the hotel Leone.  I insisted on being taken to the Sor Filomena’s house.  He replied that the house was closed, and renewed his recommendations of the Leone.  After the inevitable combat we succeeded in having ourselves set down at our lodgings, where Sor Filomena’s rosy face appeared at the open door.

“Why did you tell such a lie?” I asked of the unblushing vetturino, using the rough word bugia.

He looked insulted:  “I have not told a bugia.”

With a philosophical desire for information I repeated the question, using the milder word mensogna.  He drew himself up, looked virtuous and declared that he had not told a mensogna.

“Why, then,” I asked, “have you said one thing for another?”

It was just what he wanted.  He immediately began a profuse verbal explanation of why one thing was sometimes better to say than another, why one was truer than another, and so mixed up his una cosa and un’ altra cosa as to put me quite hors de combat, and send me into the house with the impression that I ought to be ashamed of myself for having told somebody a lie.  It brought to my mind one of my father’s favorite quotations:  “Some things can be done as well as some other things.”

I was shown to my room, which was rough, as all rooms in Asisi are, but large and high.  As Sor Filomena said, it had un’ aria signorile in spite of the coarse brick floor and the ugly doors and lumpy walls.  Some large dauby old paintings gave a color to the dimness, there were a fine old oak secretary black with age, a real bishop’s carved stool with a red cushion laid on it, and a long window opening on to a view of the wide plain with its circling mountains and its many cities and paesetti—­Perugia shining white from the neighboring hill; Spello and Spoleto standing out in bold profile in the opposite direction; Montefalco lying like a gray pile of rocks on a southern hilltop; the village and church of Santa Maria degli Angeli nestled like a flock of cloves in the plain; and half a dozen others.

I ordered writing-table and chair to be set before the window, and enthroned upon the bishop’s tabouret an unabridged Worcester—­this being probably his first visit to Asisi—­and I was immediately at home.