"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?"