r to them in a dream.

"Disappointment, of course, awaits the vast majority,
but on the evening of the vigil all are filled with
hope. They know the precedents of former years, how such
things have happened to some unfortunate people among
the pilgrims every year. Usually eight or nine miracles
take place, and lists of them are published for
distribution....

"The church records contain accounts of the miracles
which now amount to many hundreds. They are practically
all of the type I have described--cure during a vision
while incubation was being practised. For example, the
case of a man from Moldavia is on record. He had become
paralyzed during a night-watch, and the doctor could
effect no relief. He was taken to the Chapel of the
Well, and when asleep he thought he heard a voice
telling him to arise. He awoke, thought it was a dream,
and fell asleep again. A second time he heard a voice,
and saw a white-robed woman of great beauty entering the
church. In his fear he rose and walked about. His
recovery was so complete that he could walk in the
procession round the town the following day."[46]

The medicinal power imputed to the sainted relics and shrines would
naturally be considered very valuable. So it proved. Wealth flowed to
a conventual treasury or a cathedral chapter where were deposited
fragments of the martyred dead endowed with miraculous puissance. When
the Frankish forces sacked Constantinople at the beginning of the
thirteenth century, the principal object of their ferocious cruelties
and vigilant searches was the acquisition of precious relics.
Concerning these relics Fort gives the following account:

"These relics, captured in Constantinople, were divided
by the troops under Marquis de Montfort, with the same
justice as prevailed in the division of other booty. In
this way the Venetians were enabled to enrich their
metropolis with a piece of the sainted cross, an arm of
St. George, part of the head of St. John the Baptist,
the entire skeleton of St. Luke, that of the prophet St.
Simeon, and a small bottle of Jesus Christ's blood. The
Greek capital from the remotest times appears to have
monopolized this traffic in sacred wares, claiming to
possess a fragment of the stone on which Jacob slept,
and the staff transformed into a serpent by Moses.

"Here also were guarded the Holy Virgin's vestments, her
spindle, drops of her mil