goes as straight as an arrow, except where it ascends and descends from the high ground that encloses the plain of Tarbes. The chief features are the huge views of the Pyrenees and the roadside houses, which very often have curiously thatched roofs. At Soumoulou a turning to the right goes, through Pontacq, to the Roman Catholic Mecca of Lourdes. Before 1858 this famous pilgrimage centre was a village of no importance at all. It can now be [Illustration: No. 14. PAU TO ST. GAUDENS.] reached by a railway and by good roads, and there are large hotels for the thousands of Catholics who flock there every year. Unlike Rocamadour, there is no architectural charm, nor is there any peculiarity of situation, about Lourdes. It stands in one of the many picturesque valleys that open out from the main Pyrenean chain, and its medieval castle, mentioned in the previous chapter, has been much modernized. No, Lourdes became famous because a little village girl, fourteen years of age, named Bernadette Soubirous, who minded pigs, stated that she had seen and conversed with the Virgin on several occasions. Roman Catholic apologists admit that Bernadette was a diseased, asthmatic, and underfed child, and also that ‘she was not particularly intelligent.’ On the first occasion when the girl claimed to have seen the Virgin she was accompanied by her sister Marie and another companion, but neither of them saw any vision, nor did they hear the sound of wind which Bernadette thought she heard. The crowds who watched her during the numerous other occasions in the same month (February, 1858), when she went to the grotto by the Gave to see the Virgin, are said to have been impressed with the change which came over the child’s features, but she alone claimed to see anything appear in the grotto. Zola’s book pointing out the absurdity of the belief in the miraculous visions was scarcely needed; but, like Joan of Arc, the girl seems to have believed implicitly in the hallucinations which had come to her, and no doubt her consistent attitude gave the superstitious people of the neighbourhood the confidence which caused them to regard the vision as a genuine fact. After delaying any action for some months, the Bishop of Tarbes appointed a commission to inquire into the affair which was causing so much stir and excitement in Lourdes, and finally gave out his opinion in favour of Bernadette’s visions! Pope Pius IX. endorsed the Bishop’s credulity with a Bull. In 1876 a church was built above the grotto, and year after year thousands of pilgrims travel great distances to see the holy place, and to have all kinds of infirmities cured. A sacred spring, which flowed from the grotto when Bernadette, at the Virgin’s request, made a hole in the wet sand, has such remarkable effects that the blind recover their sight, the lame walk, and the nearly dead are restored to health with the application of a little of the water!