at La Verna, high above the Val d'Arno. His old eyes soften into
youthful brightness as he speaks of Italy. It was most beautiful, he
said, _bellisima!_ But he is happier here, caring for this garden, it is
most holy, _santissima!_

The bronzed Mohammedan gardener, silent, patient, absorbed in his task,
moves with his watering-pot among the beds, quietly refreshing the
thirsty blossoms. There are wall-flowers, stocks, pansies, baby's
breath, pinks, anemones of all colours, rosemary, rue, poppies--all
sorts of sweet old-fashioned flowers. Among them stand the scattered
venerable trees, with enormous trunks, wrinkled and contorted, eaten
away by age, patched and built up with stones, protected and tended with
pious care, as if they were very old people whose life must be tenderly
nursed and sheltered. Their boles hardly seem to be of wood; so dark, so
twisted, so furrowed are they, of an aspect so enduring that they
appear to be cast in bronze or carved out of black granite. Above each
of them spreads a crown of fresh foliage, delicate, abundant, shimmering
softly in the sunlight and the breeze, with silken turnings of the under
side of the innumerable leaves. In the centre of the garden is a kind of
open flower house with a fountain of flowing water, erected in memory of
a young American girl. At each corner a pair of slender cypresses lift
their black-green spires against the blanched azure of the sky.

It is a place of refuge, of ineffable tranquillity, of unforgetful
tenderness. The inclosure does not offend. How else could this sacred
shrine of the out-of-doors be preserved? And what more fitting guardian
for it than the Order of that loving Saint Francis, who called the sun
and the moon his brother and his sister and preached to a joyous
congregation of birds as his "little brothers of the air"? The flowers
do not offend. Their antique fragrance, gracious order, familiar looks,
are a symbol of what faithful memory does with the sorrows and
sufferings of those who have loved us best--she treasures and
transmutes them into something beautiful, she grows her sweetest flowers
in the ground that tears have made holy.

It is here, in this quaint and carefully tended garden, this precious
place which has been saved alike from the oblivious trampling of the
crowd and from the needless imprisonment of four walls and a roof, it is
here in the open air, in the calm glow of the afternoon, under the
shadow of Mount Zion, that