"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?"

"That was what they told me. And they told me, the birds all begun to
sing at once, and the flowers all lighted up like the sun was shining
on them. They seed her. And she come down the walk, and through the
gate," his voice lowering again to a whisper.

Aye, how the birds must have sung, and the flowers shone, to the
widowed mother as she ran, nay, leaped, down that rose-hedged walk,