On washing days the garden walks are peopled with a
company of phantom "brothers" drying in the sun. The habits are hung out on arrangements something like an easel, with their hoods pulled up to the top, and the result is a most human appearance from the back.
The rules of the order are strict; the life is hard and the fare poor; a bowl of black coffee and a piece of bread in the morning, a dish of macaroni and vegetables at noon, and soup for supper; meat is only eaten on a few of the greatest feast days.
Open house is kept for the beggars. The guest chamber has six beds in it, and every night six beggars, blind, crippled, and paralysed, wend their way to the monastery and are given food and a bed. It is the special duty of one monk to look after them, and very tenderly he puts the poor paralysed old beggar to bed and dresses him in the morning ; yet such brigands are the peasants of the village that they will steal all they can from the monks, who have themselves to beg in order to live.
The Capuchins are a mendicant order, and upon Brother Dominic devolves the unpleasant task of collecting alms. He goes from village to village, picking up a few soldi here and there, a handful of grain from one farm, half a cheese from another, a little polenta-flour somewhere else. All goes into the capacious sack in front of his saddle, for when be goes into the Campagna, where the farms are miles apart, he rides a mule and wears an immense straw hat like a tent; the latter a concession to the laws of health which impose upon one the necessity of a more effectual protection against the burning sun than that afforded by a skull-cap.
On summer evenings the monks are to be seen sitting out- side on the steps of the church in friendly converse with the beggars and the passers-by—Brother Anselm with his long beard and pallid, waxy face suggesting St. Jerome; the others, jolly burly men, more like Friar Tuck than Saints ; all kind, simple souls. Our village is a hot-bed of Socialism ; not a benevolent socialism, but one which leads to want of morals and manners. Yet one feels that even the Socialists will miss the good old monks when they go, as go they must soon. The "progressives " are going to turn out the monks, pull down the monastery, and transform the peaceful sunny old garden into public pleasure grounds, with a funicular railway down
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