On the steps of San Lorenzo Cathedral momma paused and cast a searching glance into all the corners.

“Where are the beggars?” she inquired, not without injury.  “I have always been given to understand that church entrances in Italy were disgracefully thronged with beggars of the lowest type.  I have never seen a picture of a sacred building without them!”

“So that was why you wanted so much small change, Augusta,” said the Senator.  “Mr. Bebbini says there’s a law against them nowadays.  Now that you mention it, I’m disappointed there too.  Municipal progress in Italy is something you’ve not prepared for somehow.  I daresay if we only knew it, they’re thinking of lighting this town with electricity, and the Board of Aldermen are considering contracts for cable cars.”

“Do not inquire, Alexander,” begged momma, but the Senator had fallen behind with Mr. Bebbini in earnest conversation, and we gathered that its import was entirely modern.

It was our first Italian church and it was impressive, for a President of the French Republic had just fallen to the knife of an Italian assassin, and from the altar to the door San Lorenzo was in mourning and in penance.  Masses for his soul’s repose had that day been said and sung; near the door hung a request for the prayers of all good Christians to this end.  Many of the grave-eyed people that came and went were doubtless about this business, but one, I know, was there on a private errand.  He prayed at a chapel aside, kneeling on the floor beside the railings, his cap in his hands, grasping it just as the peasant in The Angelus grasps his.  Inside the altar hung a picture of a pitying woman, and there were candles and foolish flowers of tinsel, but beside these, many tokens of hearts, gold and silver, thick below the altar, crowding the partition walls.  The hearts were grateful ones—­Alessandro explained in an undertone—­brought and left by many who had been preserved from violent death by the saint there, and he who knelt was a workman just from hospital, who had fallen, with his son, from a building.  The boy had been killed, the father only badly hurt.  His heart token was the last—­a little common thing—­and tied with no rejoiceful ribbon but with a scrap of crape.  I hoped Heaven would see the crape as well as the tribute.  When we went away he was still kneeling in his patched blue cotton clothes, and as the saint had very beautiful kind eyes, and all the tinsel flowers were standing in the glowing light of stained glass, and the voice of the Church had begun to speak too, through the organ, I daresay he went away comforted.