id, "and I thought I knew Lourdes
literature pretty well. I'll enquire."

"Look," said the prelate suddenly; "what's that place
we're coming to?"

He nodded forward with his head to where vast white lines and
patches began to be visible on the lower slopes and at the foot of
long spurs that had suddenly come into sight against the sunset.

"Why, that's Lourdes."

(II)

As the two priests came out next morning from the west doors of the
tall church where they had said their masses, Monsignor stopped.

"Let me try to take it in a moment," he said.

* * * * *

They were standing on the highest platform of the pile of three
churches that had been raised over a hundred years ago, now in the
very centre of the enormous city that had grown little by little
around the sacred place. Beneath them, straight in front,
approached from where they stood by two vast sweeps of balustraded
steps, lay the _Place_, perhaps sixty feet beneath, of the shape of
an elongated oval, bounded on this side and that by the old
buildings where the doctors used to have their examination rooms,
now used for a hundred minor purposes connected with the churches
and the grotto. At the farther end of the Place, behind the old
bronze statue of Mary, rose up the comparatively new _Bureau de
Constatations_--a great hall (as the two had seen last night),
communicating with countless consulting- and examination-rooms,
where the army of State-paid doctors carried on their work. The
whole of the open Place between these buildings crawled with
humanity--not yet packed as it would be by evening--yet already
sufficiently filled by the two ever-flowing streams--the one
passing downwards to where the grotto lay out of sight on the
left, the other passing up towards the lower entrance of the great
hall. It resembled an amphitheatre, and the more so, since the
roofs of the buildings on every side, as well as the slope up
which the steps rose to the churches, adapted now as they were to
accommodate at least three hundred thousand spectators, were
already beginning to show groups and strings of onlookers who came
up here to survey the city.

On the right, beyond the Place, lay the old town, sloping up now,
up even to the medieval castle, which fifty years ago had stood
in lonely detachment, but now was faced on hill-top after
hill-top, at its own level, by the enormous nursing homes and
hostels, which under the direction of the Religious Order