had advanced some very sharp criticisms of Lourdes." "Er--when did he live ?" "Why, not long ago; nineteenth century, at the end." Father Jervis shook his head, smiling.
"I've never heard of him," he said, "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.