CHAPTER I.
YOUTH Assisi is to-day very much what it was six or seven hundred years ago.
The feudal castle is in ruins, but the aspect of the city is just the same.

Its long-deserted streets, bordered by ancient houses, lie in terraces half-way up the steep hill-side.

Above it Mount Subasio[1] proudly towers, at its feet lies outspread all the Umbrian plain from Perugia to Spoleto.

The crowded houses clamber up the rocks like children a-tiptoe to see all that is to be seen; they succeed so well that every window gives the whole panorama set in its frame of rounded hills, from whose summits castles and villages stand sharply out against a sky of incomparable purity.
These simple dwellings contain no more than five or six little rooms,[2] but the rosy hues of the stone of which they are built give them a wonderfully cheerful air.

The one in which, according to the story, St.Francis was born has almost entirely disappeared, to make room for a church; but the street is so modest, and all that remains of the _palazzo dei genitori di San Francesco_ is so precisely like the neighboring houses that the tradition must be correct.