There were still some poor sufferers waiting outside the _piscines_, and a few others praying before the grotto; and pausing for a moment to watch them and the various passers-by, one could not help being very forcibly struck with the all-pervading atmosphere of pity. Sights that elsewhere would have been veiled from the daylight are here frankly exposed, not to a kind of shuddering, if sympathetic horror, but as pitiful, broken flowers to be gathered up, and laid with prayers upon the altar of mercy. We concluded our little tour with a visit to the Bureau des Contestations, the offices where the doctors attached to the grotto--one of them an Englishman--receive and classify the histories of the cures, examine the alleged _miraculés_, deprecating the excited allegations of some, postponing their verdicts upon others, and recording what seem to them, among a host of claims, to be genuine cases of Divine interposition. Both the doctors present when we arrived, and to whom Bettany, who had joined us, now introduced me, were extremely courteous and only too anxious to lay before me all the material at their command. Both, as I could see at once, were men accustomed to deal with human nature of the type and under the conditions that Lourdes presents, and it was therefore with very great diffidence that I found myself even mentally criticising their results. Nevertheless it is true, I think, that nothing approaching to ordinary, exact scientific observation, as the modern medical world understands it, is carried out at Lourdes; I doubt indeed if it would be possible; and I saw no instance, either then or later, of a Lourdes cure that could not be explained upon the observed and established lines of mental suggestion, or, apart from this, could bear a thorough cross-examination. Needless to say, the two doctors, both ardent and devout Roman Catholics, entirely disagreed with me, and assured me that after twenty years at the shrine they were only the more convinced of Our Lady's blesséd and material favours. And perhaps, after all, it is merely a question of terminology.