h her dreamy, silent air,
had listened passionately to that wonderful tale and carried it off with
her into the desert of foliage where she spent her days, so that she
might live it over again as she walked along behind her lambs with her
rosary, slipping bead by bead between her slender fingers.

* It was on September 19, 1846, that the Virgin is said to have
appeared in the ravine of La Sezia, adjacent to the valley of La
Salette, between Corps and Eutraigues, in the department of the
Isere. The visionaries were Melanie Mathieu, a girl of fourteen,
and Maximin Giraud, a boy of twelve. The local clergy speedily
endorsed the story of the miracle, and thousands of people still
go every year in pilgrimage to a church overlooking the valley,
and bathe and drink at a so-called miraculous source. Two priests
of Grenoble, however, Abbe Deleon and Abbe Cartellier, accused a
Mlle. de Lamerliere of having concocted the miracle, and when she
took proceedings against them for libel she lost her case.--Trans.

Thus her childhood ran its course at Bartres. That which delighted one in
this Bernadette, so poor-blooded, so slight of build, was her ecstatic
eyes, beautiful visionary eyes, from which dreams soared aloft like birds
winging their flight in a pure limpid sky. Her mouth was large, with lips
somewhat thick, expressive of kindliness; her square-shaped head had a
straight brow, and was covered with thick black hair, whilst her face
would have seemed rather common but for its charming expression of gentle
obstinacy. Those who did not gaze into her eyes, however, gave her no
thought. To them she was but an ordinary child, a poor thing of the
roads, a girl of reluctant growth, timidly humble in her ways. Assuredly
it was in her glance that Abbe Ader had with agitation detected the
stifling ailment which filled her puny, girlish form with suffering--that
ailment born of the greeny solitude in which she had grown up, the
gentleness of her bleating lambs, the Angelic Salutation which she had
carried with her, hither and thither, under the sky, repeating and
repeating it to the point of hallucination, the prodigious stories, too,
which she had heard folks tell at her foster-mother's, the long evenings
spent before the living altar-screens in the church, and all the
atmosphere of primitive faith which she had breathed in that far-away
rural region, hemmed in by mountains.

At last, on one sev