tle pool, a lively internal
emotion took possession of her, and she cried out, 'I am cured! I am
cured!' Her companions wept with joy and admiration at the miracle.
When they asked her what she had done for that great grace, her simple
reply was, 'I have prayed to St. Radogonde and St. Joseph, but
especially to the Holy Virgin, and now I am cured.' While she was
speaking, the Bishop of Poictiers came and said, 'Madeleine, thank the
Holy Virgin fervently.'"
The Rev. Canon Tandy, D.D., writing from St. Paul's Convent,
Birmingham, in 1871, to a reverend brother, informs him, in pious
phraseology, that two nuns had been suddenly cured of serious
disorders of long standing by drinking a bottle of water from Lourdes.
In acknowledgment of the favours shown by our Lady of Lourdes, the _Te
Deum_ was recited.
A deaf and dumb girl from Blois was made whole at Lourdes a few years
ago by the Virgin Mary.
Not long since the Bishop of Laval wrote a pastoral letter on the
subject of the miraculous appearance of the Virgin to four children in
a village in Mayence, and was so convinced of the reality of the fact
that he decided to erect a chapel in honour of Mary on the ground upon
which she had condescended to appear.
Recently there might be seen emerging from a church at Dieppe, on a
Saturday morning, a religious procession, headed by a person carrying
a silver processional cross, and accompanied by choristers singing
penitential psalms, proceeding to the eastern pier of the harbour to
perform a curious Roman Catholic ceremony. Taking up a position beside
the rolling water, the priests prayed for the success of the fishing,
then said a paternoster, while the people knelt; then a priest,
dipping a brush in holy water (which was carried in a swinging silver
vase), sprinkled three times the salt water of the ocean with the holy
fluid, making the sign of the cross with the brush at the words, _Seo
sibera nos a malo_. Then came a collect of repose for the souls of the
dead whose bodies had not been recovered from the depths of the sea;
and, all being over, the priests, with the choristers, people, and
cross-bearers, returned, chanting their psalms to the church, where
the high mass of the festival of St. Luke was celebrated.
This ceremony at Dieppe reminds one of the well-known annual ceremony
in Russia, of blessing the Neva in presence of the Czar and other
members of the Imperial Family; but, as the performance has been
descri
|