Miles of rail fences divide the French farms into ribbon-like strips of land that extend from the St. Lawrence far back to the wooded hills. This is the result of repeated partition of the original holdings.

mometer sometimes drops to twenty-five degrees below zero, but the people say the air is so dry that they do not feel this severe cold. Which reminds me of Kipling's

verse:

There was a small boy of Quebec

Who was buried in snow to his neck.
When they asked: “Are you friz?"

He replied: "Yes I is

But we don't call this cold in Quebec."

CHAPTER VIII

STE. ANNE DE BEAUPRÉ AND ITS MIRACULOUS CURES

HAVE just returned from a visit to the Shrine of the Good Sainte Anne, where three hundred thousand pilgrims worshipped this year. I have looked upon the holy relics and the crutches left behind by the cured and my knees are sore from climbing up the sacred stairway.

The Shrine of Ste. Anne de Beaupré, some twenty miles down the river from Quebec, is the most famous place of the kind on our continent. Quebec is the capital of French Catholicism, and Beaupré is its Mount Vernon, where good Catholics pay homage to the grandmother of their church. The other day a family of five arrived at Ste. Anne; they came from Mexico and had walked, they said, all the way. Last summer two priests came here on foot from Boston, and I talked this morning with a man who organizes weekly pilgrimages from New England. Thousands come from the United States and Canada, Alaska and Newfoundland. I saw to-day a couple just arrived in a Pennsylvania motor truck.

On Ste. Anne's day, July 26th, the number of pilgrims is often twenty thousand and more. Special electric trains and motor busses carry the worshippers from Quebec to Ste. Anne. For the accommodation of overnight visitors, the one street of the village is lined with little hotels and lodging houses that remind me of our summer

resorts. For a week before Ste. Anne's day, every house is packed, and sometimes the church is filled with pilgrims sitting up all night. Frequently parties of several hundred persons leave Quebec on foot at midnight, and walk to Ste. Anne, where they attend mass before eating breakfast.

The story of Ste. Anne de Beaupré goes back nearly two thousand years. The saint was the mother of the Virgin Mary, and therefore the grandmother of Christ. We are told that her body was brought from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, and then to Apt, in France, which thereupon became a great shrine. In a time of persecution her bones disappeared, but they were later recovered in a miraculous manner. According to tradition they were revealed to Charlemagne by a youth born deaf, dumb, and blind. He indicated by signs an altar beneath which a secret crypt was found. In the crypt a lamp was burning and behind it was a wooden chest containing the remains of the saint. The young man straightway was able to see, hear, and speak, and the re-discovered shrine became a great source of healing. This was exactly seven hundred years before Columbus discovered America.

The first church of Ste. Anne was erected at Beaupré 1in 1658. Tradition says it was built by sailors threatened with shipwreck, who promised Ste. Anne a new church at whatever spot she would bring them safely to land. Soon after the shrine was established bishops and priests reported wonderful cures, and since then, as the fame of the miracles spread, the shrine has become a great place of worship. Churches, chapels, and monasteries have been built and rebuilt, and countless gifts have been showered upon them. The first relic of Ste. Anne brought here was

a fragment of one of her finger bones. In 1892, Pope Leo XIII gave the "Great Relic," consisting of a piece of bone from the saint's wrist. This is now the chief

object of veneration by pilgrims.

On March 29, 1922, the shrine suffered a loss by fire. The great church, or basilica, was completely destroyed, but the sacred relics and most of the other articles of value were saved. The gilded wooden statue of Ste. Anne, high up on the roof over the door, was only slightly scorched by the blaze. It now stands in the gardens awaiting the completion of the new church. The new building has been planned on such a large scale that five years have been allowed for its construction. Meanwhile, the pilgrims worship in a temporary wooden structure.

The numerous buildings that now form part of the shrine of Ste. Anne are on both sides of the village street, which is also the chief highway along the north bank of the St. Lawrence. On one side the fenced fields of the narrow French farms slope down to the river. On the other, hills rise up so steeply that they seem almost cliffs. The church and the monastery and the school of the Redemptorist Fathers, the order now in charge of the shrine, are on the river side. Across the roadway are the Memorial Chapel, the stations marking "The Way of the Cross," the sacred stairway, and, farther up the hillside, the convent of the Franciscan Sisters.

One of the Redemptorists, the Director of Pilgrimages, told me much that was interesting about Ste. Anne and her shrine. He gave me also a copy of the Order's advice on "how to make a good pilgrimage." This booklet urges the pilgrim to hear Holy Mass as soon as possible. It says that "the greatest number of miraculous cures or