In such an atmosphere then, and under a cloudless, burning sky, we gathered in the afternoon, some fourteen thousand strong, in a vast circle before the steps of the grotto church. Quite early the _brancardiers_, a self-appointed order of workers, who assist in transporting the sick, had been busy bringing their charges to the great square; so that the innermost row of the waiting host was already entirely composed of sufferers praying to be healed. Marching up and down before them, clad in their robes of office, were the various priests who had come with them, telling their beads, and invoking the multitudes to prayer. As doctor to our own little party, Bettany enabled me to step within the ring, and walking with him, before the service, I made a slow round of the circle, beholding such a clinic as could be seen, I suppose, nowhere else in the world--the clinic of Our Lady of Lourdes, and one that seemed to me to contain, on this particular afternoon, pretty nearly every malady under the sun. "Seigneur, Seigneur, ayez pitié de moi." "Mein Herr und mein Gott." "Lord save us, or we perish." "Hail, Mary, blessed among women." "Seigneur, Seigneur, ayez pitié de moi." In every tongue, as we walked round, the age-old cries for mercy rang in our ears, from a faith that it was impossible to doubt, and from a depth of human need that here, at any rate, nothing short of the Divine might satisfy. Presently, just as we had made our way back to our own little party, of whom many, hitherto unsuspected, had now, by kneeling in the front row, tacitly declared themselves to be in need of physical healing, a new and solemn sound began to break upon our ears--the sonorous chanting of men's voices on the way up from the grotto in a long and slow procession. "Ave, Ave, Ave Maria," marching four abreast they now came into sight, bearing lighted candles in their hands, and in an apparently endless succession, to turn presently into the great empty space about which the rest of us were gathered. Up the centre of this they now marched, all the able-bodied men of the Toulouse pilgrimage, accompanied by many of their priests, singing the Lourdes hymn, and massing themselves at last upon the broad terrace before the grotto church. Some twenty minutes it must have taken for them thus to file past us; and finally, under a canopy borne by four stalwart attendants, came the officiating priest, clad in his heavy and gorgeous robes, and bearing before him the golden, flame-shaped monstrance in whose centre rested, as all this expectant gathering believed, the actual and visible body of the Christ Himself. As they passed us I could see that the arduous task, under this thrilling June sun, of thus holding up his Saviour to each of these thousand sufferers had fallen to our own Bishop--the highest dignitary of the Church, I suppose, who happens just now to be in Lourdes. As he moved slowly up the centre of the hot amphitheatre the