did
the poor people among whom they so willingly moved; Portiuncula was
their favorite church, but it would be a mistake to suppose that they
sojourned there for any long periods. It was their place of meeting,
nothing more. When they set forth they simply knew that they should meet
again in the neighborhood of the modest chapel. Their life was that of
the Umbrian beggars of the present day, going here and there as fancy
dictated, sleeping in hay-lofts, in leper hospitals, or under the porch
of some church. So little had they any fixed domicile that Egidio,
having decided to join them, was at considerable trouble to learn where
to find Francis, and accidentally meeting him in the neighborhood of
Rivo-Torto[9] he saw in the fact a providential leading.

They went up and down the country, joyfully sowing their seed. It was
the beginning of summer, the time when everybody in Umbria is out of
doors mowing or turning the grass. The customs of the country have
changed but little. Walking in the end of May in the fields about
Florence, Perugia, or Rieti, one still sees, at nightfall, the bagpipers
entering the fields as the mowers seat themselves upon the hay-cocks for
their evening meal; they play a few pieces, and when the train of
haymakers returns to the village, followed by the harvest-laden carts,
it is they who lead the procession, rending the air with their sharpest
strains.

The joyous Penitents who loved to call themselves _Joculatores Domini_,
God's _jongleurs_, no doubt often did the same.[10] They did even
better, for not willing to be a charge to anyone, they passed a part of
the day in aiding the peasants in their field work.[11] The inhabitants
of these districts are for the most part kindly and sedate; the friars
soon gained their confidence by relating to them first their history and
then their hopes. They worked and ate together; field-hands and friars
often slept in the same barn, and when with the morrow's dawn the friars
went on their way, the hearts of those they left behind had been
touched. They were not yet converted, but they knew that not far away,
over toward Assisi, were living men who had renounced all worldly goods,
and who, consumed with zeal, were going up and down preaching penitence
and peace.

Their reception was very different in the cities. If the peasant of
Central Italy is mild and kindly the townsfolk are on a first
acquaintance scoffing and ill disposed. We shall shortly see the f