Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/24

 Italy, or all the world, for that matter, who knew anything of her. Mr. Winnery was out in the sun in the interests of science.

For twenty-nine years he had been writing his colossal work and now for the first time a miracle had occurred, as one might have said, just beneath his nose. It was the miracle of the stigmata. In death an eccentric old maid, who lived in one room of the ruined old rookery known as the Palazzo Gonfarini, had received the marks of the Crucifixion. It was the miracle of Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Catherine of Siena. Three persons had witnessed it, besides all the mob that broke in afterward to carry off as relics all the furniture and even the clothes of Miss Annie Spragg; these witnesses were a nun known as Sister Annunziata, a priest called Father Baldessare and the janitress of the tenement, a bawdy, irreligious, anti-clerical Socialist shrew, who called herself Signora Bardelli.

Here, Mr. Winnery told himself, was a perfect laboratory specimen of a miracle. He might investigate and pull it apart to his heart's content. It was not, Mr. Winnery told himself, a very rare miracle. It was always happening somewhere. There were more than a hundred such cases on record. Only last month there had been a sausage-maker's daughter in Bavaria. . . . And there were only two cases which had been recognized as authentic and one of these at least—that of Saint Catherine of Siena—he looked upon as dubious. No one but Saint Cath-