Calling a friar who had formerly been clever at playing the guitar, he begged him to borrow one; but the friar was afraid of the scandal which this might cause, and Francis gave it up.
God took pity upon him; the following night he sent an invisible angel to give him such a concert as is never heard on earth.[6] Francis, hearing it, lost all bodily feeling, say the Fioretti, and at one moment the melody was so sweet and penetrating that if the angel had given one more stroke of the bow, the sick man's soul would have left his body.[7] It seems that there was some amelioration of his state when the doctors left him; we find him during the months of this winter, 1225-1226, in the most remote hermitages of the district, for as soon as he had a little strength he was determined to begin preaching again.
He went to Poggio-Buscone[8] for the Christmas festival.

People flocked thither in crowds from all the country round to see and hear him.

"You come here," he said, "expecting to find a great saint; what will you think when I tell you that I ate meat all through Advent ?"[9] At St.Eleutheria,[10] at a time of extreme cold which tried him much, he had sewn some pieces of stuff into his own tunic and that of his companion, so as to make their garments a little warmer.

One day his companion came home with a fox-skin, with which in his turn he proposed to line his master's tunic.

Francis rejoiced much over it, but would permit this excess of consideration for his body only on condition that the piece of fur should be placed on the outside over his chest.
All these incidents, almost insignificant at a first view, show how he detested hypocrisy even in the smallest things.
We will not follow him to his dear Greccio,[11] nor even to the hermitage of St.Urbano, perched on one of the highest peaks of the Sabine.[12] The accounts which we have of the brief visits he made there at this time tell us nothing new of his character or of the history of his life.