little village of four hundred inhabitants, very secluded and far from any frequented highway. Its few houses and small church reposed in a green hollow with wooded slopes about, and a clear rivulet went always singing through the lowlands. The house of Bernadette's foster-mother stood solitary at the end of the village. It was It was like that of any ordinary peasant, low and damp, with floors of flagstones and a roof of thatch. As soon as Bernadette was large enough, she was put to tending sheep, and, season after season, she spent her days watching her flock on the lonely hillsides. She was very thin, and always suffering from a nervous asthma, which stifled her in bad weather. At the age of eleven she could neither read nor write, and was infantile and backward. She had great trouble in learning her rosary, but, once acquired, she repeated it all day long, as she followed her grazing sheep. Her foster-mother had a brother who was a priest. He occasionally visited the family, and in the winter evenings, by the blaze of the home fire, he sometimes read marvelous stories to the householdstories of saints, angels, and heroes, of prodigious adventures, and of all kinds of strange and supernatural events. The books from which the priest read had pictures in them, and at these Bernadette was fond of looking. They were mostly of a religious nature-God enthroned in all his glory, scenes from the life of Christ, and representations of the Virgin Mary. But the book read most of all in that Bartres home was the Bible. Bernadette's foster-father, the only member of the household who knew how to read, had an old copy that had been in the family over one hundred years, and it was yellow and grimy with time and use. Every evening he would take a pin, pass it at random between the leaves, open the book where the pin had chanced to enter, and begin reading at the top of the right-hand page. The inhabitants of the region were all simple-minded and superstitious, and Bernadette was like the rest. The whole countryside was peopled with mysteries with trees which sang, stones from which blood flowed, and crossroads where, if you failed to pray promptly, a seven-horned beast was likely to appear and carry you off to perdition. Bernadette's especial terror was a certain tower of the vicinity, which she never would pass after sundown because it was said to be haunted by the fiend. When Bernadette was nearly fourteen, she began to plan for her first communion, and applied herself to learning her catechism at the church. She never had received any schooling, and her progress was SO slow that her parents at Lourdes were displeased and took her home with them, that she might continue her were very poor, and lived in one of the humblest and narrowest streets of the town. They had a single room on the ground floor at the end of a dark passage, and here dwelt father, mother, and five children. In that wretched, gloomy room they did their housework, ate, and slept. Bernadette had been in Lourdes only two or three weeks when, one chilly February morning, the mother told her to go down to the borders of the Gave and pick up some wood that she might have fuel with which to cook the dinner. A younger sister and a girl from one of the neighbors accompanied Bernadette, and the three together, hugging their ragged wraps about them to keep out the cold, went down to the stream. They had been there after wood too often to find it plentiful, but they gradually filled their arms with fragments until, following along the banks, they came to the great rocks, a half-mile from the village, rising somberly almost from the verge of the stream. It was now noon, and the Angelus rang from the parish church. At its sound PRIEST READING HIS BREVIARY Bernadette, who had lagged behind the other girls, felt a great agitation within her, and her ears were filled with such a tempestuous roar that she fancied a hurricane had descended from the mountains and was about to overwhelm her. But the trees were motionless and the air quiet. Then she glanced toward the rocks, and was half blinded by a great light which gathered against the side of a cliff, where an aperture like a rude oval window sank into the crag just above the gloomy mouth of a cavern, running back a rod or two under the base of the precipice. Bernadette fell on her knees in her fright, but kept her eyes on the niche above the cavern. Little by little in the light she discerned a white form, and she trembled lest this figure should be the devil. To protect herself against the possible evil nature of the apparition, she began to tell her beads, and then the light slowly faded and she hastened to rejoin her companions. To her surprise, they had observed nothing unusual, and when her interrogations aroused their curiosity and they began in turn to question her, she was confused and troubled and did not reply. But as they walked back to the village with their arms full of broken sticks, the questioning continued, and at length she said she had seen something white. That was interesting, and her companions on reaching home repeated the tale to their intimates, and it soon ran through the neighborhood. Bernadette's father and mother were much displeased with this childish nonsense, as they called it, and told her to keep away from the rocks by the Gave in future. However, the curiosity of the townsfolk was such that, come Sunday, nothing would do but the girl must go to the spot again, armed with a bottle of holy water, to ascertain whether or no it was the devil she had to deal with. Just as before, she saw the dazzling light, and in the light the figure, which this time became more clearly defined, smiled on her, and showed no fear of the holy water. As soon as the figure vanished, the townspeople crowded around Bernadette, eager to learn what it was she had seen. At first she replied hesitatingly and vaguely, but when she was pressed she said the figure was that of a lady, and she wore a long veil which covered her head and fell to her feet. Her robe was of the purest white, her sash blue like the sky, and on each of her bare feet bloomed a golden rose. The following Thursday Bernadette went for the third time to the riverside, and on this occasion the radiant figure requested that she should come there every noon for fifteen days. Friday and Saturday the Lady bowed and smiled, but did not speak. On Sunday, however, she wept and said to Bernadette, "Pray for sinners." Monday she failed to appear, but Tuesday she again shone forth from the dark niche above the grotto, and confided to Bernadette a secret which concerned the girl alone and which she was commanded never to divulge. On that day, too, the Lady said, "Go tell the priests they must build a chapel here." Wednesday the Lady frequently murmured the word, "Penitence, penitence !" and the child repeated the word after her, kissing the earth. Thursday the Lady said, "Go and drink and wash at the spring, and eat of the grass that is beside it." This command Bernadette did not understand, for she knew of no spring near. But when she searched and went within the cavern, a cold fountain of water began to bubble forth from the rock at the touch of her hand. The Lady again failed to appear on Friday, but was shining in the usual place on the six days following. She repeated her commands, and Bernadette humbly listened and told her beads, and each time, when the apparition vanished, kissed the earth, and on her knees sought the spring in the grotto, there to drink and wash. On the last of these six days the Lady requested more pressingly than before that a chapel might be built, and she promised that multitudes would resort to it from all nations. It was three weeks later that the apparition next shone from the cavity above the grotto. This time the Lady clasped her hands, turned her eyes toward heaven, and said, "I am the Immaculate Conception." Twice more she appeared at somewhat long intervals, the final time being July 16, when she bade Bernadette farewell. This series of apparitions, eighteen in all, caused intense excitement at Lourdes from their very beginning. Every one was curious to set eyes on the scene of the reality or not. Some believed and some mystery, and at times many thousands doubted. All sorts of stories were in were looking on while the little shep- circulation. It was remembered that a herdess, kneeling before the dark preci- shepherd had spoken of that very cliff pice, saw that glorified figure. The mul- and prophesied that great things would titude beheld only Bernadette's ecstasy. take place there. On the other hand, an its agency. From that time forth the common people had no question but that the Blessed Virgin, in compassion for suffering humanity, had come to earth there at Lourdes and given the vicinity of the grotto with its spring supernatural powers to heal. Bernadette had an almost wholly sympathetic audience in her later visions. To the assembled onlookers she was a saint, and they kissed her garments. When she knelt before the grotto with a lighted taper in her right hand and her rosary in her left, the crowd broke into sobs, and a frenzy of lamentations and prayer arose. At first it was the populace only that accepted the truth of Bernadette's visions. The clergy held aloof for months, while the civil authorities made every effort to put down the excitement by force. To the officials, Bernadette was either a liar or a lunatic, and they threatened her with imprisonment. The Commissary of Police had her before him as soon as the story of her early visions began to attract general attention, and he did his best to catch her tripping, but her story never varied. Afterward she had to appear before the judge of a local tribunal, who endeavored in vain to wring a retraction from the child. Finally two doctors examined her, and pronounced her case one of nervous trouble and diseased imagination. On the strength of this the authorities would have sent her to a hospital, but they feared the public exasperation. Things grew worse instead of better, and at last the Prefect had the approaches to the grotto occupied by the military. The cave had been decorated with vases of flowers; money and various trinkets had been thrown into it; and some quarrymen, inspired by the contagious religious enthusiasm, had, without remuneration, cut a reservoir to receive the miraculous water, and had cleared a path under the hillside. The Prefect felt that the time had come to take decided action and root out the whole superstition. He would remove the offerings from the grotto and build a palisade across the front to keep the deluded mobs away. It took him half a day to find any one willing to let him have a cart on which to carry off the accumulation of offerings. Two hours later the person of whom he hired the cart fell from a loft and was seriously injured, while the next day a man who lent him an ax had one of his feet crushed by the fall of a block of stone. The Lord was plainly on the side of the people; but, for some reason or other, the Commissary escaped unscathed. Amid jeers and hisses he took away the pots of flowers, the tapers that were burning, and the bits of money and the silver hearts which lay on the sand. The Then the palisades were put up; but the people, hungering for healing, found ways to pass the guards and to get over or through the palings, and the prohibition of the authorities only aroused anger and spread the fame of the place wider. names of trespassers were taken, and soon a woeful procession of the lame and sick came before the Justice of the Peace to answer for their defiance of the law. It seemed to them that the officials had no pity for human wretchedness. One day a whole band of poverty-stricken and ailing folk went to the Mayor, knelt in his courtyard, and implored him with sobs to allow the grotto to be reopened. A mother held out toward him her child, barely alive-would he let the little one die in her arms, when there was a spring so near which had saved the children of other mothers? A blind man called attention to his eyes; and there were others who showed unsightly sores, maimed arms, crippled legs. But the Mayor was unable to promise anything, and the crowd withdrew weeping and rebellious. The struggle went on for nearly half a year, and the people grew more and more restive. It was rumored that whole villages intended to come down from the hills and "deliver God," as they termed it. The parish priest at the time of the visions did not hesitate to express his skepticism of their genuineness, and he and the rest of the clergy of the region ignored the whole affair as long as they could; but in the end they succumbed to the popular will and gave their sanction to the truth of all that the people believed. Then the civil authorities retracted, the palisades were removed, and everybody was allowed free access to the grotto. Immediately afterward the land was purchased by the Bishop of the district, and the Church began its work at Lourdes. As miracles multiplied and money flowed in more and more from all parts of Christendom, the scope of the |