MacPhilpin 1880, Google Books scan of Harvard copy

A Mayo Lourdes.

From the London "Daily Telegraph."

Some time ago a rumour began to prevail in Ireland that supernatural manifestations took place at or near the Catholic chapel of Knock, in the county Mayo. It was stated that an apparition of the Virgin Mary, attended by celestial personages, supposed to represent St. Joseph and St. John, had appeared to several persons on a certain night in August; subsequently to others on New Year's Eve, and a third time, to yet others, on the Eve of the Epiphany, and on the ninth of February. But this was not all. A further rumour stated that miracles of healing were frequently wrought upon sick persons who made pilgrimages and performed devotions at the favoured shrine, that miraculous virtues were possessed by the very plaster from the walls of the church, and that the faithful were crowding in ever-increasing numbers to the place thus suddenly dragged from obscurity into fame. So matters stood when, in the discharge of a mission connected with the Irish distress, I found myself at Claremorris, a little town about six miles from the much-talked-of village. It became my duty there to seek an interview with the parish priest—the Very Rev. Ulick J. Bourke, Canon of Tuam, and late President of St. Jarlath's College—a gentleman well known to philologists as the author of a learned work on the Aryan origin of the Gaelic race. Canon Bourke, having acted on a Commission appointed by the Archbishop of Tuam to take the evidence of those who asserted that they had seen the Apparitions, was well able to put me in the way of ascertaining particulars for myself, and within an hour of my introduction to him, I was face to face with one of the persons who deposed to the August vision.