d organ began to peal out the music of
Gounod's Saint Cecilia Mass. Presently it died down; there was a short
pause, then, like the rising of a musical storm came the subdued
voices of the choristers from the closed vestry. The door was
gradually opened, and the music swelled out into the church. The
crucifer, a beautiful lad, attired in a blood-red cassock and a white,
lace-trimmed cotta, entered. Behind him, chanting, came a long train
of choir-boys, followed by two acolytes who swung by chains of brass
censers from which rose clouds of fragrant smoke. Two priests brought
up the rear; one, the celebrant of the Holy Communion, was
magnificently garbed. He wore a trailing black cassock of richest
silk, and over it a short lawn cotta trimmed with priceless lace, an
enormous cloth-of-gold cope on the back of which blazed a cross
wrought in jewels. About his neck he had a white stole, over an arm a
snowy maniple, upon his head a priestly beretta.

"Is it not beautiful?" asked the poor woman of her son. But he did not
hear her. His eyes, blinded by tears of infinite sorrow, were resting
on the white statue of the Virgin near the snowy altar of marble, on
which burnt a constellation of tapers and candles around the red lamp
of the "Holy Presence."

His breast heaved; a sob escaped him, and his head sank upon his
chest.

"And they do this in the name of love," he said, as if in prayer.
"They make an idol of my memory while my brothers and sisters are
dying for the lack of love and kindness. They do all this to praise me
whom they have so little understood. O God, my Father, let this trial
pass, or make me as you are that I may, this time, set them right, for
I suffer past endurance."

The short sermon ended. The celebration of Mass began. The wafer and
the wine were consecrated. The priest raised the wafer before the
eyes of the congregation and said, "This is my body," and all heads
bowed low.

"At the very instant you hear the bell strike," whispered a man to a
boy near the mother and son, "at that very instant the Saviour will be
there--listen!"

"Father, forgive them," the woman heard her son say, and she followed
him out of the church. They had reached the street when three strokes
from a silver bell was heard.

A few minutes later, as they were passing through a squalid street on
the way home, they came to a little church. He read her wishes in her
face, and they went in. A man approached and showed them to a