"What isn't true, my dear?" "God!" answered the boy, turning his eyes upward to the ceiling again, and looking, as it were, at some object miles away, "and the kneeling people, and the priest. It's true, and no lie. This is my body, this is my blood." And he joined his hot and feverish little hands together as if in prayer.
"Don't trouble about this," said I to the weeping mother. "I know what it is. He has been down to Mike Maloney's, in the Brook woods, and seen the Catholic Mass. Don't refer to it again just now. I will give him some composing medicine. But I wish," I added, "that this had not happened. It only tends to weaken him."
Presently I noticed him playing with his fingers on the coverlet as if he were playing the organ. I thought to take advantage of this, and said:
"Ally, my boy, get well soon, now, and let us have a grand voluntary on the organ—one of your very best."
"For God, for Mass, for the kneeling people and the priest," he murmured.
"Oh! never mind the Mass," said I, "that's nothing to you."
Turning his eyes suddenly upon? me, he cried:
"O doctor! it seems everything to me. I never can forget it. How could anybody ever forget they had seen Mass. Could you?"
"That I can't say, Ally," I replied; "for I never saw it."
"Never saw it! Why, I've seen, it."