for years as being paralytic, could not ascend the mountain but with the greatest difficulty, and with the aid of crutches.  On the first day of the neuvane, that of her arrival, she felt a sensation as if life was coming into her legs, which had been for so long tune dead.  This feeling went on increasing, and the last day of the neuvane, after having received the communion, she went, without any assistance, to the cross of the assumption, where she hung up her crutches.  She also was cured.

“Bishop Lucon must have known that this was mere imposition; yet, so far from exposing a fraud so base, he not only permits his people to believe it, but he lends his whole influence to support and circulate the falsehood.  And why?  Ah! a church was to be erected; and it was necessary to get up a little enthusiasm among the people in order to induce them to fill his exhausted coffers, and build the church.  In proof of this, we have only to quote a few extracts from the ‘Pastoral’ which he issued on this occasion.

“’And now,” he says, “Mary has deigned to appear on the summit of a lofty mountain to two young shepherds, revealing to them the secrets of heaven.  But who attests the truth of the narrative of these Alpine pastors?  No other than the men themselves, and they are believed.  They declare what they have seen, they repeat what they have heard, they retain what they have received commandment to keep secret.

“A few words of the incomparable Mother of God have transformed them into new men.  Incapable of concerting aught between themselves, or of imagining anything similar to what they relate, each is the witness to a vision which has not found him unbelieving; each is its historian.  These two shepherds, dull as they were, have at once understood and received the lesson which was vouchsafed to them, and it is ineffaceably engraven on their hearts.  They add nothing to it, they take nothing from it, they modify it in nowise, they deliver the oracle of Heaven just as they have received it.

“An admirable constancy enabled them to guard the secret, a singular sagacity made them discern all the snares laid for them, a rare prudence suggested to them a thousand responses, not one of which betrayed their secret; and when at length the time came when it was their duty to make it known to the common Father of the Faithful, they wrote correctly, as if reading a book placed under their eyes.  Their recital drew to this blessed mountain thousands of pilgrims.

“They proclaimed that ’on Saturday, the 19th of September, 1846, Mary manifested herself to them; and the anniversary of this glorious day is henceforth and forever dear to Christian piety.  Will not every pilgrim who repairs to this holy mountain add his testimony to the truthfulness of these young shepherds?  Mary halted near a fountain; she communicated to it a celestial virtue, a divine efficacy.  From being intermittent, this spring, today so celebrated, became perennial.