mid-heaven.

Certaldo, as perchance you may have heard, is a town of Val d'Elsa within
our country-side, which, small though it is, had in it aforetime people
of rank and wealth. Thither, for that there he found good pasture, 'twas
long the wont of one of the Friars of St. Antony to resort once every
year, to collect the alms that fools gave them. Fra Cipolla(1)--so hight
the friar--met with a hearty welcome, no less, perchance, by reason of
his name than for other cause, the onions produced in that district being
famous throughout Tuscany. He was little of person, red-haired,
jolly-visaged, and the very best of good fellows; and therewithal, though
learning he had none, he was so excellent and ready a speaker that whoso
knew him not would not only have esteemed him a great rhetorician, but
would have pronounced him Tully himself or, perchance, Quintilian; and in
all the country-side there was scarce a soul to whom he was not either
gossip or friend or lover. Being thus wont from time to time to visit
Certaldo, the friar came there once upon a time in the month of August,
and on a Sunday morning, all the good folk of the neighbouring farms
being come to mass in the parish church, he took occasion to come forward
and say:--"Ladies and gentlemen, you wot 'tis your custom to send year by
year to the poor of Baron Master St. Antony somewhat of your wheat and
oats, more or less, according to the ability and the devoutness of each,
that blessed St. Antony may save your oxen and asses and pigs and sheep
from harm; and you are also accustomed, and especially those whose names
are on the books of our confraternity, to pay your trifling annual dues.
To collect which offerings, I am hither sent by my superior, to wit,
Master Abbot; wherefore, with the blessing of God, after none, when you
hear the bells ring, you will come out of the church to the place where
in the usual way I shall deliver you my sermon, and you will kiss the
cross; and therewithal, knowing, as I do, that you are one and all most
devoted to Baron Master St. Antony, I will by way of especial grace shew
you a most holy and goodly relic, which I brought myself from the Holy
Land overseas, which is none other than one of the feathers of the Angel
Gabriel, which he left behind him in the room of the Virgin Mary, when he
came to make her the annunciation in Nazareth." And having said thus
much, he ceased, and went on with the mass. Now among the many that were
in the