LADY-DAY AT KNOCK.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VII, Issue 393, 22 October 1880, Page 19

LADY-DAY AT KNOCK.

(From the Freeman Special Commissioner.) When I last stood on the dreary plateau o£ Ituock it was m the terrible fall of last year, when the shadow of famine and death lay heavy upon the dismal moors and upon the hearts of the people. an angel might well have touched the scene since to transform . it into the smiling thing it appeared to me in the rich haze of last evening's sunset. Its bare undulations were lighted with harvest colours and exhaled harvest perfumes. The crops looked healthy and abundant, the very farmhouses seemed to have put on a new and happier face, as indeed they have done, for the trade of lodging pilgrims has grown to be so good a one that nearly every little country cabin has got whitened up and papered and furnished with its iron bedstead and its mattresses, even to the out-offices. But once moie the religious aspect of the place was the overruling and everpresent element in the change. The only thing unaltered is Archdeacon Kavanagh's own modest little thatched cottage and his own gentle piety, which is the same in theinoon of his church's fame as it vras in the days of its obscurity. The scattered cabins of the village have been linked logether by a street of timber sheds, arranged into shops, with a large turf fire .burning in a stone enclosure in front of each of them. Here there are long dinner-tables spread, good rough country cookery, and you can have meat, milk, mild refreshments, pastry, fruit, floury potatoes, and all the luxuries of a little peasant town. Passing through this busy hazaar, and noting the groups spread in picnic fashion over all the adjoining fields, we entered the chapel yard shortly after the Angelus bell was ringing. The wondrous epectacle of living, passionate faith which it presented at once absorbed all other thoughts. The most hardened unbeliever would take off his hat and involuntarily sink upon his knees in presence of such a sight. Several thousand people were at the moment collected in or around the church. Immediately fronting us was the sanctuary ■wall or gable, on which the apparitions are said to have been manifested. It was boarded half-way up to prevent the too eaeer pilgrims from tearing away the whole of the cement, or perhaps the whole of the wall, but so enormous has been the demand for the cement that the whole face of the gable has been stripped all but a square foot or so of plaster at the apex. Hows of disused crutches, sticks, trusses, armcases, and bandages, are fastened up along the whole width of the timber hoarding, having been left there in testimony of miraculous cures. Almost every day adds something to the list of these sacred trophies. A little temporary altar was erected in the open air about the spot assigned to the apparition of the Blessed Virgin. In front of this altar, in front of the humble mission cross close by, in the church, at the doors, and in fact on every foot of ground around it, people were prostrated on their knees praying aloud. Some one in a group of half-a-dozen would commence the Rosary aloud. The responses would be taken up all round, until they rose into a sort of solemn chant welling up from the very soul. Cripples, paralytics, deformed persons, blind men, an epileptic child were led around the church, raising their supplications aloud with a tender truthfulness which no words can survey. Others were hammering here and there at the walls for a fragment of the precious plaster, or even for a morsel of the church's earthen flooring. Within the church itself the Bosary rose in a solemn, measured swell, with all the fervour of overflowing hearts. At times the intensity of the prayer somehow almost took one's breath away with a feeling of indefinable suspense and expectation. In one corner of the churchyard a group was listening eagerly to the delighted narrative of a hoy who had suffered for years from a paralysis of the tendons of one leg, and who had that day for the first time stretched the injured leg with perfect freedom. I heard tell of several similar circumstances within the past few days, but I was not able to get any particulars that would warrant me in expressing or forming any opinion on the subject. It is certain that numbers of people profess to have themselves witnessed miraculous cures and visions. This is not the place to say more than that the faith therein seems to be in itself little short of miraculous. Darkness was beginning to fall as I was leaving, and the appearance of the sacred encampment, with its line of watchfires burning like an army's, the groups of dark figures circling around the church, whose bold bell-tower was still distinctly defined against the paling sunset sky, the fresh streams of pilgrims that were now still coming up, regardless of the night, with their carpet bags slung over their shoulders or their mattresses carried in carts, was such as nobody seeing it once was likely to forget.