Youth With Strange Power.
As Alfred Bassette (who had taken in religion the name of Brother André) grew up, he displayed a mysterious power that was soon heralded around the countryside. Amongst his earliest miracles was that of healing several victims of smallpox during the epidemic of forty-seven years ago. Another is mentioned as having occurred over thirty years ago, when a young student was badly injured in a game of ball. Before medical assistance could be secured Brother André successfully applied “first aid to the injured,” and when the doctor arrived the patient was again playing ball. Other cures of a minor nature were effected by him, and these gave him a local notoriety. The first major miracle that brought him wider fame occurred in 1910, when Mr. Martin Hannon, a C.P.R. employee at Quebec, who was the victim of a serious accident two years previously by which his legs and feet were terribly crushed through heavy marble blocks falling upon them, visited him. Hannon had been unable to walk without crutches, and on crutches he went to Brother André, who rubbed his mangled limbs with holy oil and prayed over him, and then told him to throw his crutches away, for he was cured. Hannon dispensed with his crutches and walked then and since without even the use of a cane. The following day he visited La Patrie office, told of his miraculous cure, and Brother André’s reputation as a Miracle Man spread afar. I could not tell you of the multitudes that have sought Brother André’s intercession and prayers, comparatively few unavailingly, but I have seen two instances myself, in each of which what appeared to be serious cases, were restored to health. One, a young lady from Plattsburg, N.Y., who had walked on crutches for seventeen years, after a visit to Brother André, handed her crutches to her maid and walked several yards to her automobile. Another was a young lady from near Tupper Lake, N.Y., who was cured of paralysis, and who told me in Windsor St. station how, after seeing Brother André, she was able for the first time in several years, to use her limbs freely. But a still greater miracle, to my lay mind, was one of more recent date, and word of it came from London, England, in a letter from an old friend who is the wife of an Irish nobleman, once a member of the British House of Commons, and who while visiting Montreal last autumn, accompanied me to the shrine, and carried away with her oils and images of St. Joseph and other souvenirs. But here is her letter referring to the miracle:
“I have a little story you may like to tell Brother André. When I came home in November, I found a letter from a young friend I had not seen since he was in a perambulator. It was to ask my prayers for his mother who was dying from the effects of an accident. Her foot caught as she was going down a very steep flight of stairs to the Underground Railway, at Baker street, and she fell the whole length of it, hitting her head and one of her knees very badly. When she was conscious she was taken home, and for three or four days declared she was only severely bruised and shaken. Then suddenly she went clean out of her senses and knew no one and raved about people dead long ago, and she called for me in my maiden name, as I used to know her when I was a girl. It was that that put it into her son’s head to write to me that she was not supposed to live very long, and the doctors had very little hope of her. I was told she was in a mental hospital, and that she did not know her son when he went to see her. I asked permission to go there, and was given leave. They told me she could utter nothing but gibberish, and was very weak. When I came to her bedside, I would not have recognized her, but I looked straight into her eyes and told her I was ‘Alice.’ Then she caught my hand and held it convulsively, and her poor tongue and lips were uttering an incomprehensible jumble over and over again. At last I hit upon it; she was repeating over and over again a prayer in Polish her mother had taught her as a child. I recognized two of the words (her mother was a Pole, a Princess). . . I told the nurse she was saying a prayer in Polish and she was not able to say anything else. I sat by her for some time, and as her memory of years ago seemed to be the only workable part in her brain, I asked her in French was she suffering pain? And at once she responded and said ‘No, not at all,’ and then went off in the ejaculatory prayer. The nurse moved off, and I put my hand into my pocket and brought out Frère André’s little bottle of blessed oil, and I made the sign of the Cross with a little of the oil on her, and St. Joseph’s medal in my hand. And I just asked if there was any merit in Frère André’s prayers that this poor woman might be restored to health for her only son’s sake. I came away. The nurse thought it a bad case. I went to Ireland for three weeks, and on my return sent a ’phone message to the son, fearing he would tell me his mother was dead. But to my joy he said she had completely recovered, and was now at a rest home to get up her strength. Tell Brother André that. You must also tell him to pray for peace in Ireland.”