I cannot resist the temptation to relate a little incident concerning this same learned Professor Cristofani, it struck me as so quaint.  He is a poor man—­literature, and even teaching, do not pay very well in Italian paesi—­and he has a family.  Cheaply as servants may be employed, he could not afford one, and his wife was not very well.  Last summer the Alpinisti visited Asisi, and some of the principal members, having an introduction to him, wished to visit him.  Their stay in Asisi was short, and, being sunrise-and-mountain-top people, they made their call at six o’clock in the morning on their way to the top of Mount Asio, from which Asisi takes its name, and, I may here add, the correct spelling of its name, which I have followed.  A servant from the Leone Hotel showed the visitors to the house, and very stupidly knocked at the kitchen-door.  A loud “Avanti!” from within answered the knock.  The door was opened by the guide, revealing a tableau.  The professor, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up and an apron tied on, was earnestly kneading a mass of dough preparatory to sending it to the baker’s oven, where everybody bakes their bread, and his pretty blonde young daughter was making coffee at the kitchen fire.

“Well, I am a poor man, and my wife was sick,” he said afterward, in telling the story, with a sad smile in his eyes, which are as blue and almost as blind as violets.

These stories awaken a laugh only at the time, but gain a certain sublimity when years have gilded them—­like that one of St. Bonaventura, which this reminds us of:  When the two legates sent by the pope of that time to carry the scarlet beretta of a cardinal to St. Bonaventura set out in search of him, they were obliged to follow him to a little Franciscan convent at a short distance from Florence, where he had retired for devotion and to practise for a while the humble rules of his order.  As these two dignified prelates came solemnly around an angle of the building they glanced through the open kitchen-window, and were astonished to see the personage they sought engaged in washing the supper-dishes.  He accosted them with perfect calmness, and, learning their errand, requested them to hang the hat in a tree near by till he should have finished washing the dishes.  They complied, and the pots and pans and plates having been attended to, the whole community adjourned to the chapel and the saint received the dignity of prince of the Church.

The eight days’ festa of Corpus Domini opened in Asisi with one of the most exquisite sights I have ever seen, the procession of the cathedral as it passed from San Francesco through Via Superba on its return to the cathedral.  We took our places in a window reserved for us, and waited.  There all was quiet and deserted.  The air was perfumed by sprigs of green which each one had strewn before his own house.  One living creature alone was visible—­a little boy who knelt in the middle of the street and