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 by their proud resistance to all powers filled one of the finest pages of religious history in the Middle Ages.
This success, which bathed the soul of Francis with joy, did not arouse in him the smallest movement of pride.

Never has man had a greater power over hearts, because never preacher preached himself less.