“Is this the miracle chapel, little boy?”

“Yes, ma’am; yes.”  Then his expression changed to one of eagerness, yet hardly less anxious.

“Here.  Take this—­”

He did not hold out his hand, the coin had to seek it.  At its touch he refused to take it.

“I ain’t begging.”

“What are you looking at so through the fence?” He was all sadness now.

“Just looking.”

“Is there anything to see inside?”

He did not answer.  The interrogation was repeated.

“I can’t see nothing.  I’m blind,” putting his eyes again to the hole, first one, then the other.

“Come, won’t you tell me how this came to be a miracle chapel?”

“Oh, ma’am,”—­he turned his face from the fence, and clasped his hands in excitement,—­“it was a poor widow woman who come here with her baby that was a-dying, and she prayed to the Virgin Mary, and the Virgin Mary made the baby live—­”

He dropped his voice, the words falling slower and slower.  As he raised his face, one could see then that he was blind, and the accident that had happened to him, in fording the street.  What sightless eyes!  What a wet, muddy little skeleton!  Ten?  No; hardly ten years of age.

“The widow woman she picked up her baby, and she run down the walk here, and out into the street screaming—­she was so glad,”—­putting his eyes to the peep-hole again,—­“and the Virgin Mary come down the walk after her, and come through the gate, too; and that was all she seed—­the widow woman.”

“Did you know the widow woman?”

He shook his head.

“How do you know it?”

“That was what they told me.  And they told me, the birds all begun to sing at once, and the flowers all lighted up like the sun was shining on them.  They seed her.  And she come down the walk, and through the gate,” his voice lowering again to a whisper.

Aye, how the birds must have sung, and the flowers shone, to the widowed mother as she ran, nay, leaped, down that rose-hedged walk, with her restored baby clasped to her bosom!

“They seed her,” repeated the little fellow.  “And that is why you stand here—­to see her, too?”

His shoulder turned uneasily in the clasp upon it.

“They seed her, and they ain’t got no eyes.”

“Have you no mother?”

“Ain’t never had no mother.”  A thought struck him.  “Would that count, ma’am?  Would that count?  The little baby that was dying—­yes, ma’am, it had a mother; and it’s the mothers that come here constant with their children; I sometimes hear ’em dragging them in by the hand.”

“How long have you been coming here?”

“Ever since the first time I heard it, ma’am.”

Street ragamuffins do not cry:  it would be better if they did so, when they are so young and so blind; it would be easier for the spectator, the auditor.

“They seed her—­I might see her ef—­ef I could see her once—­ef—­ef I could see anything once.”  His voice faltered; but he stiffened it instantly.  “She might see me.  She can’t pass through this gate without seeing me; and—­and—­ef she seed me—­and I didn’t even see her—­oh, I’m so tired of being blind!”