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and outside, four or five deep, their women-folk and odd outsiders. This is a place for the mute revealing of secrets, and faces, that have hidden from the world all outward traces of illness, are present inside the ring, the declared sufferers from who shall say what manner of divers diseases. We notice that the sick of each pilgrimage are ranged together, decked with little badges of distinction, while before each separate body of them moves a priest, a rosary in his hand, leading them in prayer. The men of the various pilgrimages, such as are able-bodied, have not yet come upon the scene, but will presently march here in procession, bearing their particular banners, and each carrying a lighted candle in his hand. To the last moment of waiting the brancardiers are busy making room for sick late-comers, easing and arranging with the deft hands of pity and experience. And so at last to the chanting of a hymn come the first figures of the long procession from the Grotto.

Marching in two parallel rows of single file, sufficiently wide apart or the banner-bearers in the middle to have plenty of elbow-room, they come in an apparently interminable series, entering the wide open space at its distant end, and dividing to take each side of the waiting circle on their way to the platform in front of the Chapel. Here they begin to gather themselves en masse, an army of black smocks, for a background to the white-robed priests. Presently, at the far end of the procession, there comes into sight the canopy, borne by four bearers, beneath which walks the officiating priestan English bishop to-day, as it chances-bearing the golden, sunshaped monstrance with its sacred burden. Behind him walk one or two attendants and his chaplain; and so in a moment or two the great hour of the Blessing of the Sick has begun. The fervour becomes intense; and as the bishop, in his heavy robes, moves slowly from patient to patient, the crowd in his immediate neighbourhood fall upon their knees, the others in one voice, if with many tongues, calling out across the wide spaces their age-old cries for mercy: 'Seigneur, Seigneur, ayez pitié de moi!' 'Lord, save us, or we perish!' 'Mein Herr und mein Gott!'

The hot sun pours down upon us. There is no shade. The great arena is a white glare of reflected light. And to the bishop, swathed in vestments, stooping continually to each succeeding sufferer, the centre, if only vicariously, of this great tide of adoration, our sympathy goes out. For fully an hour, perhaps for longer, his slow journey must proceed. None can be left out. He must neither slacken nor be weary. As he draws near at length, and we too bend

upon

at his approach, we can see the perspiration standing out in beads his forehead. The crowd about us thrills to the approaching wave of ecstasy. But for him it has been the wave's crest all the way along. And yet it is just this, as he tells us afterwards, that robs him of any thought of bodily fatigue. He is borne upwards upon it as upon a sea of visible and passionate belief. And he himself is supported by the very exaltation of all these ten thousand worshippers, that it has been his high privilege to arouse. Afterwards, in the quiet of the hotel, he may encounter the inevitable weariness of reaction, but out here his mission holds him tireless. So, finally, and to an ever-deepening note of almost agonised entreaty, he completes the long round, moves up towards the platform at the top, takes his stand before the assembled body of men and priests, and pronounces above the whole kneeling concourse the words of his last benediction. An immediate stillness falls over us, prolongs itself for a moment, and then, from a far corner there comes a sudden odd cry. The multitude of faces swings round like a leaf to the wind. A meek-faced little woman, who has been bed-ridden for fourteen years, rises up from her invalid chair, totters a few steps into the open space. she is a miraculée.

Behold,

A few minutes later we are enabled to make our way through the surging crowd about the Bureau des Contestations, the little room near the Grotto, where the doctors, always in attendance, receive and set down the testimonies of the patients, examine the evidences, laugh away gently the too-ready protestations of a cure that are so frequently made, and admit to the records such as seem worthy of their place. The crowd beats against the door, but inside there is a comparative calm, and we are allowed to examine the miraculées at our leisure, all women to-day, four of them, emerged from the thousands. The little meek-faced woman, with the rapture of her devotion still shining in her eyes, rises and shakes hands with us. The evidence of her bedridden years seems satisfactory, although we note that there appears to be no obviously insuperable physical reason why she should not have walked before. But no matter. The controversial side of Lourdes and its cures have been fought out on many arenas; and if we construe the miracle after another fashion we can still congratulate her very heartily upon the happy consummation. We stay a little while with the doctors, chatting about their work, impressed with the unfailing tenderness and sense of humanity with which they strike the practical note,

that must inevitably come as something of an anti-climax to the scene that we have just been witnessing.

On the road to the hotel we overtake the bishop, wending a leisurely way back to dinner. Two Belgian women kneel down to kiss the big amethyst ring that is the sign of his office, the bond of their common Catholicity lying too deep for any interference of race or language. Must we believe these things? We know already that to do so is no essential canon of the Catholic faith, and this bishop, humblest of prelates, is yet something of a statesman. No doubt, he assures us, for every temporal blessing these poor folk receive they will receive twenty spiritual ones; and how can so great a faith be spent in vain? So we return together rather silently, and one of us, at any rate, with the conviction that he has been admitted to the inner sanctum of a great and vital creed. The details might have jarred perhaps upon a too æsthetic purist; even the objective of it all, to the large majority, this apparently whimsical interference of the Divine Pity, after much beseeching, in the humdrum earthly ailments of so tiny a proportion, might have seemed crude beyond belief. Yet we knew that, for all that, these acres of sunbaked gravel had still been holy ground; while if this afternoon had been in any degree typical, then its consecration rested upon a tradition scarcely less sacred perhaps than that assigned to it by its most literal believers.

And yet perhaps, of all hours spent at Lourdes, it will not be this, but one later, that will remain longest in the memory of a brief visit-an hour that struck a note no less ardent than that of its predecessors, but with a certain added quality of rejoicing, that came as a fitting crown upon the day's devotion. Between eight and nine o'clock, as we drank our after-dinner coffee in the little boulevard, there came up to us the first bars of the Lourdes hymn, and presently between the trees we could see a growing myriad of tiny lights flashing about the Grotto. The hymn waxed stronger, Ave, Ave, Ave Maria-Ave, Ave, Ave Maria, with a slow and almost barbaric, yet joyful, monotony. And as we went down towards the scene of the afternoon's service, we could see it gathering shape, this giant procession of candle-bearers, men, women, and children-French, Flemish, English, American, priests, peasants and gentry-moving towards us with no semblance of confusion, but after a settled plan, a river of light in the soft June darkness. Above it the outlines of the Basilica had already been pencilled out in electric lights, its delicate spire, in a haze of pale-blue

radiance, lifting itself up against the deepening violet of the sky. At the opposite end of the dim arena the head of the carved Virgin was surrounded with a bright halo of tiny lamps; and upon the summit of the Pic du Ger, three thousand feet high over the little town, there blazed out among the stars a flaming cross, the last word, if one may so put it, in the stage-management, as though the very heavens themselves had declared themselves in worship. For an hour we stood there, while they filed past us, rank upon rank, each separate battalion of singers, renewing the melody of the hymn in all manner of different keys, and with a hundred varying accents, but never conveying the least impression of discord-a spectacle and chorus unique surely in two hemispheres. They were still singing when the bells struck nine, and it must have been nearly ten o'clock when at last the whole vast gathering assembled before the Rosary Chapel to recite the Credo with such an intensity of unquestioning conviction that our young priest of the morning, if he were present, must have felt his very being leap out to embrace them. It would have been the day's last note for him, no doubta note of triumphant justification. For ourselves, as we returned finally to our hotel, there remained perhaps another one. shady corner, yet still in the very heart of all that had been taking place, we came accidentally upon a lover and his sweetheart. We saw him stooping in the act of bestowing upon her a very leisurely embrace-not an uncommon sight, perhaps, but one that gave us just then a distinct sensation of shock. It served, at any rate, to remind us how far, in twenty-four hours, we had diverged from a normal humanity.

In a

H. H. BASHFORD.

537

THE SYMPATHETIC WHUR.

ACCIDENT, often the best friend of the author, brought me the other day a letter from a stranger containing invaluable information concerning the poet of The Female Friend' (that masterpiece). It was particularly welcome to me because ever since I quoted part of The Female Friend' in a book, I have had to parry not only questions as to its authorship, but, by the less discerning, compliments too. In spite of what I have said, and in spite also of only too great a body of evidence proving my incapacity, I am still occasionally credited with these faultless stanzas; which may now be quoted once again, in their entirety, the better to make it clear to the reader how far they are beyond anything within my limited range:

In this imperfect gloomy scene

Of complicated ill,

How rarely is a day serene,

The throbbing bosom still!
Will not-

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But no, I will not quote it yet. The Female Friend' is so incomparably the best of its author's poems that I will keep it to the end and first say something of the poet and of his other work.

The author of 'The Female Friend' was the Reverend Cornelius Whur, a clergyman ministering in East Anglia, in-one need hardly inform the discriminating reader-the first half of the nineteenth century. His poetical effusions are to be found in two volumes, 'Village Musings on Moral and Religious Subjects,' published at Norwich in 1837, and Gratitude's Offering, being Original Productions on a Variety of Subjects,' published also at Norwich, in 1845. Both collections were published by subscription, and many well-known Norfolk and Suffolk names may be found in the list. In 'Village Musings' I find the beneficent Joseph John Gurney (two copies) and Bernard Barton of Woodbridge (two copies). Joseph John Gurney, however, soon had enough, for when 'Gratitude's Offering' came out he declined to subscribe at all, while Bernard Barton reduced his risk by half. Amelia Opie had one of each book.

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