had ever seen before; then a child twelve
years old whose corneas resembled marbles, but who, in three seconds,
became possessed of clear, deep eyes, bright with an angelic smile.
However, there was especially an abundance of paralytics, of lame people
suddenly enabled to walk upright, of sufferers for long years powerless to
stir from their beds of misery and to whom the voice said: "Arise and
walk!" Delannoy,* afflicted with ataxia, vainly cauterised and burnt,
fifteen times an inmate of the Paris hospitals, whence he had emerged with
the concurring diagnosis of twelve doctors, feels a strange force raising
him up as the Blessed Sacrament goes by, and he begins to follow it, his
legs strong and healthy once more. Marie Louise Delpon, a girl of
fourteen, suffering from paralysis which had stiffened her legs, drawn
back her hands, and twisted her mouth on one side, sees her limbs loosen
and the distortion of her mouth disappear as though an invisible hand were
severing the fearful bonds which had deformed her. Marie Vachier, riveted
to her arm-chair during seventeen years by paraplegia, not only runs and
flies on emerging from the piscina, but finds no trace even of the sores
with which her long-enforced immobility had covered her body. And Georges
Hanquet, attacked by softening of the spinal marrow, passes without
transition from agony to perfect health; while Leonie Charton, likewise
afflicted with softening of the medulla, and whose vertebrae bulge out to
a considerable extent, feels her hump melting away as though by
enchantment, and her legs rise and straighten, renovated and vigorous.

* This was one of the most notorious of the recorded cases and had
a very strange sequel subsequent to the first publication of this
work. Pierre Delannoy had been employed as a ward-assistant in one
of the large Paris hospitals from 1877 to 1881, when he came to
the conclusion that the life of an in-patient was far preferable
to the one he was leading. He, therefore, resolved to pass the
rest of his days inside different hospitals in the capacity of
invalid. He started by feigning locomotor ataxia, and for six
years deceived the highest medical experts in Paris, so curiously
did he appear to suffer. He stayed in turn in all the hospitals in
the city, being treated with every care and consideration, until
at last he met with a doctor who insisted on cauterisation and
other disagreeab