It is one of the happier signs of the times that we have advanced so far on the road of reform in our liturgical music that the Bishops can now order (what, in the past, they could only recommend) that, whenever the priest sings his peculiar part of the Mass, the choir should sing theirs. Yet, on account of certain fixed ideas, the new regulation is more honoured in the breach than the observance. One is that the Kyriale must always be sung to some harmonised setting taken from Cary’s or Fischer’s catalogue. No parochial body but a select choir can sing such a composition and therefore the peculiar business of the choir is the Kyriale. This duty they have always carried out to the best of their ability; but as it exhausts all their energies, any additional work must be ignored as a counsel of perfection. It takes time to absorb such a revolutionary idea as that the Kyriale, which the choir have only recently usurped, is the canonical right of the people; and that the Proper, which the choir have systematically neglected, is their only raison d’etre.

Another fixed idea is that the Proper of Mass, like that of Vespers, if sung at all, must be sung to the official chant. The choir know nothing of this ancient idiom and there’s an end on’t. Now Catholic choristers are sensible men and women, quite as ready as other parochial workers to do the right thing when they know it.

‘SOEUR Marie Bernard est morte : quelles souf-frances depuis vingt ans!’ Sister Mary

Bernard is dead : how she must have suffered all these twenty years.’ Nearly fifty years have come and gone since the day in Easter week when these words fell on my ears from the holy and revered priest, the friend and guardian of my childhood. He had known and loved the little peasant-girl of the Pyrenees and had often spoken about her to the child, still unfamiliar with death, who listened to his words. To the latter the name of Sr. Marie Bernard had hitherto called up only wonder and admiration. She had seen more than once the Mother of fair Love, the Cause of our Joy! Had not the Beloved Mother promised, too, to make her happy in the kingdom of her Son?

But there was no mistaking the accents of compassion in the mouth of the good priest. He knew so well what poor Bernadette had had to endure for those twenty-one years she still dwelt in this vale of tears, after having beheld, fleetingly no doubt, perhaps ‘through a glass, darkly,’ the Vision of incomparable Loveliness.

The shy, retiring child had had to submit to the harsh interrogatories of officialdom, to be followed by the scarcely less intolerable and more persistent, crossquestionings of numberless enquirers, doubtless wellmeaning, often tactless, sometimes even baldly curious. In a later period her Superiors sought to shield her as much as might be from the inquisitive,

In his Dedication of the Encomium, Moriae Erasmus writes to More:

— Have a norange.

— Mon premier est un métal précieux;

Mon second est un habitant des cieux;

Mon tout est un fruit déicieux.

— Yes ; there’s truth in that, and scarcely exaggeration. (John, fetch the N.E.D., article ‘orange.’) It’s too great, really; too round, too golden, too juicy, too Brangwyn, too coster’s barrow, too abundant.

— Augustine consecrated it in an able image.

— Looking at it as segments compact in the cortex. We think of it as a bag of juice; a potable lawn-tennis ball. (What’s it say, John?)

— ‘Orange, orenge, narancia, arancia, naranza, naranja, laranja; mediceval Greek, nerantzton.’

— Push on.

—1 The fruit of a tree {see sense 2) a large, globose, many-celled berry (Hesperidium) with sub-acid juicy fulf, inclosed in a tough rind, externally of bright reddish yellow colour.’

— Thattledoo.

— Globose. That dates Dr. Murray’s early education.

—You can hear the governess’s voice : ‘The form of the earth is oblate spheroid; in other words, like an orange. Now if I were to take a knitting needle,’

— pin, she meant, but don’t let her go on. The earth, an orange; a globose fruit (which is what the

N.E.D. means);

— (Look up ‘berry,’ John)

— the association is impressed in our minds.

— Should you think ....

— ‘Berry. Any small globular or ovate fruity not having a stone'

— Thattledoo. Should you think that geodesy and the orange are practically contemporaneous?

— 1497. For bering the appill oreynzeis fra the schip.

— It was regular merchandise in the middle ages; but I see the globose berry growing more delectable and less of a medicine as time passes ....