The ostensible object was three days' religious
fêtes to celebrate the transportation of the relics
of the last new saint beatified at Rome, and
thence brought to Arras by Monseigneur the
Bishop Parisis. For three days the relics were
exposed to public veneration on a splendid throne
erected behind the high altar of the basilica.
The cathedral, richly draped with crimson velvet,
hung with flowers and green leaves, pealing
with new music, filled with a struggling and
inquisitive crowd, and with no ventilation except
the open door, recalled the historical temperature
of the famous Black Hole. Except to a favoured
few around the prelate, the Archbishop of
Rouen's sermon was rendered inaudible by the
shuffling bustle of comers and goers, and the
disputes between persons who hire chairs by the
year, and those who only hire them by the day.
The procession, especially, gave the old Spanish
streets of Arras the aspect of an opera-house in
which the manager is determined to ruin himself.
It closed with the cortége of the Bienheureux
and the said three-and-twenty bishops. As the
Saint's mortal relics remained enthroned in the
cathedral, and were not carried through the
streets, he was represented by a group consisting
of his own statue reposing on a cloud, surrounded
by angels, and crowned by the Virgin, with the
serpent smitten and precipitated in the  direction
of the bottomless pit.

And who is this last new saint? The reader
shall hear.

The Bienheureux (the Blessed) Benoit Joseph
Labre, the eldest of fifteen children, was born at
Amettes, a village lying in the province of Artois,
south of the town of Aire, and north of Arras,
on the 26th of March, 1748, and died at Rome,
in the odour of sanctity — by no means a figurative
expression—on the 16th of April, 1783. The
whole of his earthly biography was, therefore,
completed before the outburst of the grand
tempest of the first French revolution. Of his
posthumous adventures, the most wonderful, up
to the present date, took place on Sunday, the
15th of July, 1860, and the two following days.

The Blessed Benoit Labre's epoch is not so
far removed from our own time, but that there
remains in his native neighbourhood some tradition
derived from personal reminiscences. Those are
not flattering; verily, in his own country, he is no
prophet for a multitude of scoffers though not
heretics. By such profane persons he is spoken
of as the prince ot idle and filthy fellows; his
name, Labre, is even purposely pronounced
Ladre, meaning scabby, mangy, leprous. He
came of an ultra-religious (perhaps we might
say credulous and superstitious) family, several
of whose members manifested their dreamy and
fanatic tendencies by retirement into monasteries
and nunneries. Jean-Baptiste, the Blessed
Benoit's father, was the proprietor of eighty
acres of land and a substantial house; all which,
according to the then custom of the Boulonnais,
would have gone to the eldest son. There were
also very comforting expectations of inheritances
from ecclesiastical uncles.

The blessed boy was unlike other children;
no play for him, but plenty of church. He was
so fond of mass, that, when he came back from
it, he set up a little toy-altar and repeated all
the ceremonies before it. Whenever he was
naughty, as the most blessed boys will sometimes
be, he was set some little penitence, such as
holding his arms in a cross, or other corporeal
mortification. The severest punishment would
have been to make him learn his lessons. His
Paters, and Aves, and genuflexions, and crossings,
left no room in his brain for earthly knowledge.
When house, and lands, and all were spent,
dirt and ignorance were most excellent. In a
vision; an angel whispered to him, "Multiplication
is vexation, Division is as bad; the Rule of
Three will puzzle thee, and Fractions
drive thee mad." So he never crossed the ass's
bridge; Latin was a stumbling-block; and he
never set foot on the Gradus ad Parnassum.
At all his attempts to enter the Roman
Catholic priesthood — for which his uncles did
Their best to "cram" him — he was what flippant
Cantabs call "plucked," although the classical
attainments then required were not those
of an Oxford first-class man. Books of piety
were all they could get him to read; prayer,
penitence, and meditation, were all they could
get him to do. Still he was a very good boy
indeed; his conscience would not allow him to
eat even the windfall fruit in his uncle's garden,
and his humility was such that he obeyed his
uncle's servants as if they were his superiors.
Once, when his father sent him to lift some corn
that was sprouting in the field in consequence
of wet weather, he set about the task so stupidly
as to get a parental scolding. To which he
meekly replied, that he was not called to do the
things of this world. When his uncle told him
to work harder at Latin, or, at least, to set a
bout doing something, he answered that he
intended to enter a Trappist convent. As he was
too pious to be a farmer, and too illiterate to be
a parish priest, he consoled himself with the
belief that his fit vocation was to be a friar.
When his parents begged him, with tears and
entreaties, to give up the idea of burying himself
alive, he answered that his conscience would
allow of no truce or delay; that he ought to
obey God before any one else, and that he
could not resist His will. So he went on his
way rejoicing.

But the Trappists would not have him; he
was too young, they said —not quite twenty,
and small and weakly too. Their youngest
member must be twenty-four. He then tried the
Chartreuse de Longuenesse, near St. Omer.
He was politely received; the mansion pleased
him greatly; the regularity which reigned in
that pious retreat increased his desire of being
taken in. They could not oblige him, just
then, because the monastery had received
considerable injury from fire; they advised him
to apply to the Chartreuse de Montreuil, where
they promise to receive him, if he will first
learn the elements of philosophy and church
music.

Unreasonable Carthusians, to exact such severe