the tenderest of ridicule-less, indeed, perhaps, than might be beheld upon an August day in Keswick.

The older part of the town, lying on the right bank of the Gave, clusters round the rocky cliff upon which the old Château, a typical frontier fortress, and once held by the English, is set four-square, a sober comment upon the more garish modern architecture, that surrounds and surmounts the Grotto lower down and upon the opposite side of the stream. But it is here that the true soul of the place abides; and for every pilgrim that climbs up to the stern old battlements, there will be a thousand to flock before the candle-lit crevice under the Basilica. The one may have played its part perhaps in the making of a little earthly history; but this other has become one of the gates of God. Within it-it is scarcely larger than an ordinary dining-roomthere stands now an altar before which one or more masses are daily said. To one side, beyond walls worn smooth with the elbows and rosaries of half a century of pilgrims, is placed a picture of the Virgin, a shrine illuminated with a stack of continually burning candles. Across its entrance is now a palisade of railings, against which, except at certain times, the faithful must be content to wait and watch, and through which, as they kneel before the Grotto, the Communion is administered to them.

In front of the Grotto, stretching back to the roadway that has been built, with a parapet, alongside the river, are arranged rows of seats seldom empty of worshippers, while beside it are the Piscines, or baths, where the sick may be dipped in water led from the Grotto spring. Perched upon the rock, out of which the Grotto has been carved, is the Basilica, the great church that commemorates the visions, and whose slender spire has become the most prominent landmark for a good

many miles around. Below it is the crypt, lined with memorial tablets, set there by such as have been desirous of visibly recording the blessings that have been granted to them; and below and in front of this is the Chapel of the Rosary, whose porticoes stand open to the great open space, flanked by descending terraces around which, in the afternoon, will be gathered the strangest multitude of sufferers, perhaps, to be seen in all the world, the sorrowful clinic of our Lady of Lourdes.

Just now they are crowded about the entrance to the baths, far more of them than can be admitted, one fears, in this single day, even though the official hours were never so elastic, or the brancardiers-a body of self-elected attendants-never so eager or efficient. Here there are waiting in rows upon the seats, in chairs and stretchers, on strong arms and crutches, the tangible illustrations of a whole library of textbooks-poor malades, with patient faces, some frankly hopeless, brought here by the efforts and hard savings of a pleading family, others still holding with both hands to the unconquerable hope in a Divine interposition. Are there not a thousand crutches hanging there from the rocky front of the Grotto, evidences of past favors from the Blessed Virgin-visible signs of mistaken diagnoses, says our unbelieverand behind these the reports, true and legendary, of a thousand other benefits and cures?

So they wait, an always changing audience, knocking at the portals of Heaven's mercy, sprinkling themselves with the holy water brought to them in little cans and bottles, and biding their time, with what patience they can command, for their turn to be dipped bodily in the healing stream. Sights that would ordinarily revolt, perhaps, become here merely the occasion for murmurs of pity, for the reiterated invocations of passers-by. Scarred faces,

that would be timidly veiled in any other corner of the world, are here laid bare to the sunshine with a frank pathos, if haply even looking upon so sacred a scene may gain some little boon of miracle. As we linger upon the hot pavement we study them for awhile, sick and well, men and women, who might, any one of them almost, have sat for Millet or Le Breton, dogged, devoted, childlike, if you would have it so, but with the childhood that believes and is made happy in a literal Heaven and a very personal Godhead. Is it not wonderful? A young priest, speaking English, pauses for a moment at our side. Is it not wonderful? And he reminds us that, alas! France must be no longer regarded as a Catholic country. He shakes a sorrowful head. The State has pronounced against religion-against clericalism, if you like to put it that way-but in reality against religion, and with a fervor of bitterness, of which only a Latin race could be capable. They have robbed us of the children, he says, and the times are evil; and yet, behold, is there another country in all the world that could offer such a spectacle of faith as this? The smile that is never far away, for all the solemnity of Lourdes, breaks out again, if a trifle wistfully. Ah, la belle France, but it will all come right in the end. The pendulum will swing back. The heart of the people must have its God again, and its God is still the dear Son of our Lady of Lourdes.

And it is here, after all, we reflect, that we see Lourdes at its best, here at the Grotto and the Piscines, in the Basilica and the crypt, and the Rosary Chapel, in the great space below the terrace, and around the gaudy statue of the Virgin at its opposite end. Up there, towards the Château, whether we will or not, the more commercial side of it all must intrude itself upon us-the great hotels, with their lifts

and telephones and large profits, the electric trams, the shops full of statuary and medals, the waxwork presentations of scenes in little Bernadette's short life-she died some twenty years ago in a convent-all these; and we cannot help feeling that Bernadette, by her visions, has conferred a very substantial material prosperity upon her relatives and fellow-citizens. And yet again, all the time, so simple is the history, so artless the investigations that followed it, so entirely sincere the devotion of the many to the few, that one cannot but spurn as unworthy any idea of a deliberate charlatanism. The prosperity has been the gift of Heaven, the inevitable adjunct to a holy celebrity. And why not?

On our way back from our morning stroll we meet an English pilgrimage, the largest that has ever come here, on its way to be received by the Bishop of Tarbes, whose palace overlooks the valley of the Grotto. We exchange greetings and pass on, up through some narrow by-ways of the town, and presently, crossing the river higher up, drop down into a path by its side, winding up towards the beautiful valley of Angeles, towards Pierrefitte and Cauteret and the inner heart of the French Pyrenees. And here, for a brief breathing space, we touch fingers again, upon the outskirts of the town, with a more usual existence. Here the grass is being cut in great fragrant swathes, and upon the banks of the river the old women are washing their clothes. The air is heavy and languorous, unpurged by yesterday's thunderstorm, and we turn regretful eyes towards the snow tops of twenty miles away. Lazily we complete our circle, returning again through a busy market-place into the crowded streets. Black eyes flash at us appraisingly, brown fingers hold up rosaries for our regard, and we are called upon to observe the attractions of a hundred inexpensive trinkets. We

pass the hospital, filled to its last corner with the sick from all corners of Europe, tended by devoted Sisters, and the scene, we are assured, of numerous unexplainable miracles. We pass sheds where the poor and hardy may spend the night for nothing, and lodging-houses to suit any sort of purse. And so the hot hours pass away for us quickly enough until, as three o'clock draws near, there comes for each sick person, for every faithful pilgrim indeed, the supreme moment of the day, when the officiating priest, bearing the golden monstrance, shall hold out in benediction to each worshipping sufferer the broken body of his Lord and Saviour.

This is the ceremony towards which converges the whole of the day's preparations. It is the crisis, as it were, of the universal worship, the breakingpoint of spiritual tension, a breakingpoint, often enough, of tears and sobs, and the commonest moment, we are assured, of healing manifestations. Here there must be gathered, in an almost tropical sunshine, at least ten thousand persons, ranged round in a great circle, below the steps of the Rosary Chapel, the sick innermost, with the brancardiers watching over them, and outside, four or five deep, their womenfolk 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

To the

a lighted candle in his hand. 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 for 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 priest-an English bishop to-day, as it chances-bearing the golden, sun-shaped 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 fervor becomes intense; and as the bishop, in his heavy robes, moves slowly from patient to patient, the crowd in his immediate neighborhood 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, ayex 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 jour

ney must proceed. None can be left out. He must neither slacken nor be weary. As he draws near at length, and we too bend at his approach, we can see the perspiration standing out in beads upon 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 agonized 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, pro longs 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. Behold, she is a miraculée.

A few minutes later we are enabled to make our way through the surging crowd about the Bureau des Contesttations, 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 tooready 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 The Cornhill Magazine.

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 doubt--a note of triumphant justification. For ourselves, as we returned finally to our hotel there remained perhaps another one. In a 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 twentyfour hours, we had diverged from a normal humanity.

H. H. Bashford.