cries of the poor _malades_ and their friends redoubled themselves in ardour. "Seigneur, Seigneur, ayez pitié de moi." The tides of adoration rose and fell and rose again until, as step by step he passed along the circle, they climbed up to a crest of almost agonising entreaty. "Lord, save us. Lord, save us, or we perish." To left and right we could hear the broken voices sobbing their prayers to God, and even among our more stolid English sufferers could see the tears running down the uplifted worshipping faces. Watching the Bishop, as at last, after perhaps half an hour, his laboured progress brought him opposite to ourselves, I could not help feeling how great must be the burden now bearing upon his shoulders, since apart from the actual physical strain, the continual stooping, in his thick robes and with his heavy monstrance, over patient after patient in this thunderous heat, the emotional tax must have been enormous. For upon him and That which he bore there impinged now the whole sum of these heart-wrung supplications. Upon his vicarious shoulders he must carry, as it were, the multitudinous petitions of all these kneeling thousands. And yet it was just this, as afterwards, in the cool of the hotel, he assured me, that was his chief support. Upborne by all this simple and unshakable belief, it was only then that he was beginning to feel the bodily weariness that the long procession had entailed upon him. So step by step he passed upon his way, until, more than an hour later, the long round had been at last completed. And it was then, in a momentary silence that followed the conclusion of his passage, that from the far end of the circle a little cry arose, and a woman, bedridden, as we afterwards learned, for more than fourteen years, rose up from her chair, and tottered out into the space before her. Instantly the cry was everywhere abroad, "A miracle, a miracle"; and like a leaf on the wind of ten thousand shoulders, she was being borne in an ecstasy of triumph towards the Bureau des Constatations. It was here, an hour later, that I saw her, a gentle-faced, devout little peasant woman, about whose past history the evidence seemed fairly conclusive. Smiling at us, she took a few steps across the room among the uplifted hands and eager exclamations of the assembled priests. But, alas, there would appear to be no physical reason why she should not have walked thus at any time during her invalid years, if only some stimulus, sufficiently effective, had been applied to her before.