f the common people, folk of
field and mountain, muleteers and vine-dressers, woodmen and hunters,
so that they in turn might be light of heart amid their toil and
sorrow. One great hymn he composed, and of that I will speak later;
but indeed all his sayings and sermons were a sort of divine song, and
when he sent his companions from one village to another he bade them
say: "We are God's gleemen. For song and sermon we ask largesse, and
our largesse shall be that you persevere in sorrow for your sins."

Seeing that ladies of the world, great and beautiful, took pleasure in
the songs of the troubadours sung at twilight under their windows, he
charged all the churches of his Order that at fall of day the bells
should be rung to recall the greeting with which Gabriel the Angel
saluted the Virgin Mother of the Lord: "Hail, full of grace, the Lord
is with thee, blessed art thou among women." And from that day to this
the bells have rung out the Angelus at sunset, and now there is no land
under heaven wherein those bells are not heard and wherein devout men
hearing them do not pause to repeat that greeting angelic.

In like fashion it was great delight to him (the Pope having given him
leave) to make in the churches of the Order a representation of the
Crib of Bethlehem on the feast of the Nativity. Of these the first was
made at the hermitage of Greccio. Thither the peasants flocked on
Christmas Eve, with lanterns and torches, making the forest ring with
their carols; and there in the church they found a stable with straw,
and an ox and an ass tethered to the manger; and St. Francis spoke to
the folk about Bethlehem and the Shepherds in the field, and the birth
of the divine Babe, so that all who heard him wept happy tears of
compassion and thankfulness.

And as St. Francis stood sighing for joy and gazing at the empty
manger, behold! a wondrous thing happened. For the knight Giovanni,
who had given the ox and the ass and the stable, saw that on the straw
in the manger there lay a beautiful child, which awoke from slumber, as
it seemed, and stretched out its little hands to St. Francis as he
leaned over it.

Even to this day there is no land in which you may not see, on
Christmas Eve, the Crib of Bethlehem; but in those old days of St.
Francis many souls were saved by the sight of that lowly manger from
the sin of those heretics who denied that the Word was made flesh and
that the Son of God was born as a little ch