of the crowded spectators
shone out other lights, steady as stars in the motionless half-lit
evening air. Then, as he went, slowly, pace by pace, he remembered
the sick and glanced down, as the music on a sudden ceased.

Ah! there they lay, those living crucifixes . . . . shrouded in
white, their faces on either side turned inwards that they might
see their Lord. . . . There lay a woman, her face shrivelled with
some internal horror--some appalling disease which even the
science of these days dared not handle, or at least had not; her
large eyes staring with an almost terrible intensity, fixed, it
seemed, in her head, yet waiting for the Vision that even now
might make her whole. There a child tossed and moaned and turned
away his head. There an old man crouched forward upon his litter,
held up on either side by two men in the uniform of the
brancardiers. . . . And so, in endless lines, they lay; from
every nation under heaven: Chinese were there, he saw, and
negroes; and the very air in which he walked seemed alight with
pain and longing.

A great voice broke in suddenly on his musings; and, before he
could fix his attention as to what it said, the words were taken
up by the hundreds of thousands of throats--a short, fervent
sentence that rent the air like a thunder-peal. Ah! he remembered
now. These were the old French prayers, consecrated by a century
of use; and as he passed on, slowly, step by step, watching now
with a backward glance the blessing of the sick that had just
begun--the sign of the cross made with the light golden
monstrance by the bishop who carried it--now the agonized eyes of
expectation that waited for their turn, he too began to hear, and
to take up with his own voice those piteous cries for help.

"_Jesu! heal our sick. . . . Jesu! grant that we may see--may
hear--may walk. . . . Thou art the Resurrection and the
Life. . . . Lord! I believe; help Thou mine unbelief_." Then with
an overwhelming triumph: "_Hosanna to the Son of David! Hosanna,
Hosanna!_" Then again, soft and rumbling: "_O Mary, conceived
without sin, hear us who have recourse to thee._"

The sense of a great circumambient Power grew upon him at each
instant, sacramentalized, it seemed, by the solemn evening light,
and evoked by this tense ardour of half a million souls, and
focused behind him in one burning point. . . .

Ah! there was the first miracle! . . . A cry behind him, an eddy
in the circle of the sick and the wai