sco di Assisi_, 1 vol., 12mo,
Citta di Castello, Lapi, 1884. Vide pp. 103-113).

* * * * *

CHAPTER XI

THE INNER MAN AND WONDER-WORKING

The missionary journey, undertaken under the encouragement of St. Clara
and so poetically inaugurated by the sermon to the birds of Bevagna,
appears to have been a continual triumph for Francis.[1] Legend
definitively takes possession of him; whether he will or no, miracles
burst forth under his footsteps; quite unawares to himself the objects
of which he has made use produce marvellous effects; folk come out from
the villages in procession to meet him, and the biographer gives us to
hear the echo of those religious festivals of Italy--merry, popular,
noisy, bathed in sunshine--which so little resemble the fastidiously
arranged festivals of northern peoples.

From Alviano Francis doubtless went to Narni, one of the most charming
little towns in Umbria, busy with building a cathedral after the
conquest of their communal liberties. He seems to have had a sort of
predilection for this city as well as for its surrounding villages.[2]
From thence he seems to have plunged into the valley of Rieti, where
Greccio, Fonte-Colombo, San Fabiano, Sant-Eleuthero, Poggio-Buscone
retain even stronger traces of him than the environs of Assisi.

Thomas of Celano gives us no particulars of the route followed, but, on
the other hand, he goes at length into the success of the apostle in the
March of Ancona, and especially at Ascoli. Did the people of these
districts still remember the appeals which Francis and Egidio had made
to them six years before (1209), or must we believe that they were
peculiarly prepared to understand the new gospel? However this may be,
nowhere else was a like enthusiasm shown; the effect of the sermons was
so great that some thirty neophytes at once received the habit of the
Order.

The March of Ancona ought to be held to be the Franciscan province _par
excellence_. There are Offida, San-Severino, Macerata, Fornaro, Cingoli,
Fermo, Massa, and twenty other hermitages where, during more than a
century, poverty was to find its heralds and its martyrs; from thence
came Giovanni della Verna, Jacopo di Massa, Conrad di Offida, Angelo
Clareno, and those legions of nameless revolutionists, dreamers, and
prophets, who since the _extirpes_ in 1244 by the general of the Order,
Crescentius of Jesi, never ceased to make new recruits, and b