_Dr_.--How long do they walk about without crutches or pains in their limbs? Why don’t you take us behind the scenes, and let us test and follow up some of these cures? _Priest_.--We can’t take you behind the scenes, for there are no scenes to go behind. We tell you _we_ don’t do the cures, or know precisely how they are done. We can’t hinder your inquiries, and don’t want to hinder them if we could. There are the tablets of “reconnaissance,” with names and addresses; you can go to these, if you like, or talk to the patients whom you see at the spring or in the chapels. _Dr_.--Come, now! You don’t really mean to say you believe that our Lord’s Mother appeared to this girl on 23rd March 1858, and told her that this Lourdes was a specially favourite place with her; and that she has since that time given these special healing qualities to the water or air of Lourdes, or whatever it is that causes these effects at this place? _Priest_.--We mean to say that the girl thoroughly believed it, and we hold that her impression--her certainty--didn’t come from the devil, as it must if it was a lie; that it wasn’t the mere dream of a hysterical girl, and was not given her for nothing. Else, how can one account for these buildings, costing, perhaps, as much as one of your finest cathedrals, all put up in thirty-five years? _Dr_.--Yes; but that doesn’t answer my question. Did the Mother of our Lord appear to this girl, and is it she who works the cures. _Priest_.--If you mean by “appear,” “come visibly,” we don’t know. But you should remember always that the French have a very different feeling about the Madonna from you English. Perhaps you can’t help connecting her with another French girl, Joan of Arc, who believed the Madonna had appeared to her and told her she should turn you English out of France, which she did--a more difficult and costly job even than building these churches. _Dr_.--Well, we won’t argue about the Madonna, and I am quite ready to admit that the evidence you have here, in the tablets and votive offerings, the crutches and bandages, are _primâ-facie_ proof that numbers of pilgrims have gone away from Lourdes under the impression that they were cured. What I maintain is, that you have not shown, and cannot show, that your cures are not merely due to the absorption of diseased tissue as the result of strong excitement--an effect not at all common, but quite recognised as not unfrequent by some of the highest authorities in medical science.