It was for these poor people the supreme moment.  They had come from afar at an expense which they could ill afford; they had endured fatigue, perhaps hunger; and they had been mocked at.  But, so far, they had accomplished their task.  They had confessed their sins with all the fervor and sincerity of which they were capable, had visited the birthplace, the home, the basilica and the distant mountain-retreat of St. Francis, and they had gathered the miraculous yellow fennel-flowers of the mountain.  Now they were to receive the Pardon.  The chains of hell had fallen from them in confession:  at the moment of entering the chapel the bonds of Purgatory would also be loosened, and if they should drop dead there, or die before having committed another sin, they would fly straight to heaven as larks into the morning sky.  No passing from a miserable present to a miserable Purgatory, but unimaginable bliss in an instant.  Their ideal bliss might not be the highest which the human mind is capable of conceiving, but it was the highest that they could conceive, and their souls strained blindly upward to that point where imagination faints against the thrilling cord with which the body holds the spirit in tether.  To these people heaven was not a mere theological expression, a vague place which might or might not be:  it was as real as the bay and the sky of Naples and the smoking volcano that nursed for ever their sense of unknown terrors.  It was as real as the poppies in their grass and the oranges ripening on their trees.  Maria Santissima, in her white robe and the blue mantle where they could count the creases, was there, with ever the vision of a Babe in her arms, and Gesu, the arms of whose cross should fall into folds of a glorious garment about his naked crucified form, in sleeves to his hands, in folds about his feet and raised into a crown about his head.  Into this blessed company no earthly pain could enter to destroy their delights.  Cold and hunger and the dagger’s point could never find them more, nor sickness rack them, nor betrayal set their blood in a poisoned flame, nor earthquakes chill them with terror.  Lying in that heavenly sunshine, with fruit-laden boughs within reach and heaps of gold beside them if they should wish for it, they could laugh at Vesuvius licking in vain with its fiery tongue toward them, and at the black clouds heavy with hail that would spread ruin over the fields far away from these celestial vineyards and the waving grain of Paradise.

Exalted by such visions, what to them were the gazing crowd and their own rags and squalor?  They entered the Porziuncola singing:  they came out at the side-door transfigured, and silent except for some breathless “Maria!” or “Gesu!” Their arms were thrown upward, their glowing black eyes were upraised, their thin swarthy faces burned with a vivid scarlet, their white teeth glittered between the parted lips.  Round and round they went like a great water-wheel that revolves in sun and shadow, and the spray it tossed up as it issued from the Porziuncola was rapture, the fiery spray of the soul.