gh despoiled of their
only tunic, they would not ask for its restitution. If, moved to
pity, men gave back to them what they had taken away, they
accepted it cheerfully.

There were those who threw mud upon them, others who put dice
into their hands and invited them to play, and others clutching
them by the cowl made them drag them along thus. But seeing that
the friars were always full of joy in the midst of their
tribulations, that they neither received nor carried money, and
that by their love for one another they made themselves known as
true disciples of the Lord, many of them felt themselves
reproved in their hearts and came asking pardon for the offences
which they had committed. They, pardoning them with all their
heart, said, "The Lord forgive you," and gave them pious
counsels for the salvation of their souls.

A translation can but imperfectly give all the repressed emotion, the
candid simplicity, the modest joy, the fervent love which breathe in the
faulty Latin of the Three Companions. Yet these scattered friars sighed
after the home-coming and the long conversations with their spiritual
father in the tranquil forests of the suburbs of Assisi. Friendship
among men, when it overpasses a certain limit, has something deep, high,
ideal, infinitely sweet, to which no other friendship attains. There was
no woman in the Upper Chamber when, on the last evening of his life,
Jesus communed with his disciples and invited the world to the eternal
marriage supper.

Francis, above all, was impatient to see his young family once more.
They all arrived at Portiuncula almost at the same time, having already,
before reaching it, forgotten the torments they had endured, thinking
only of the joy of the meeting.[17]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] 1 Cel., 23; 3 Soc., 25 and 26; Bon., 27. Cf. _Auct. Vit.
Sec. ap._, A. SS., p. 579.

[2] 1 Cel., 24. We must correct the Bollandist text: _Inter quos
quidam de Assisio puer ac simplicem animum gerens_, by: _quidam
de Assisio pium ac simplicem_, etc. The period at which we have
arrived is very clear as a whole: the picture which the Three
Companions give us is true with a truth which forces conviction
at first sight; but neither they nor Celano are giving an
official report. Later on men desired to know precisely in what
order the early disciples came, and they tortured the