The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1913-07-26
SCRAP BOOK FOR TO-DAY

Thousands of Catholics will congre- gate today at the various shrines to observe the solemn feast of St. Anne, Mother of Mary. whose relics are be- iieved to possess miraculous healing powers. The i'll and the halt, crippIes with bodies pathetically warped, suf ferers from the various diseases that anlict humanity, buoyed up by hope of cure and sustained by an unfaltering faith, will totter and limp to the shrines where the sacred bones are dis played, and go away with the assur- will take pity on them and release them from their ills. Whether by di- vine aid or what the scientists call "auto-sugg gestion,'' this faith has often been justified, and thousands Of heal thy and happy people attribute their cure to the bones of St. Anne.
 The solemn services in honor of St. Anne extend over nine days. ending with the festival day of the Mother of Mary, the twenty-sixth of July, The novena. or nine days devotion, is ob- served at St Anne's churches in Chi cago. San Francisco, St. Anne, H.. Port Richmond and many other cit ies, and at the little French church of St. Jean Baptiste in New York. all of which possess relics of the saint, but the most remarkable of American shrines is that in the village of Ste.
 
 from all over the continent gather there on the feast day of St. Anne. and volumes would be required to re- cord the miraculous cures attributed to the relics. The historian Parkman wrote of this famous shrine:
 ssAbove all. do not fail to make your pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Anne. Here, when Ailieboust was governor, he began with his own hands the pious work, and an tnhabitant of Beaupre' Louis Guimont, sorely afflicted with rheumatism. came grinning with pain to lay three stones in the founda- tfon. in honor probably of St. Anne, St. Joachim, and their daughter the Virgin. Instantly he was cured. It was but the beginning of long course of miracles continued more than two centuries, and continuing still. The devotion to St. Anne became a distinguishing feature of Canadian. CathoItcity, till at the present day at 1east thirteen parishes bear her name But of all her shrtnes, none can match the fame of St. Anne du Petit Cap Crowds f1ocked thither on the week of her festival. and marvellous cures were wrought uneeasingly, as the sticks and crutches hanging on the walls and columns still attest. Some times the whole shore was covered with the wigwams of Indian converts who had padded their birch canoes from the farthest wilds of Canada. The more fervent among them would crawl on their knees from the shore to the altar. And, in our own day, every summer a far greater concourse of piigrims-net in paint and feath- CTS, but in cloth and millinery, and not in canoes, but in steamhoats- bring their offerings and their vows to the tBonne Sainte Anne.
 The scenes enacted during the mo- venas at the shrines of St. Anne are based on the Biblical story of the pool of Bethesda. where the crippled, the aged and inhrm, those suffering from disease, were wont to gather and wait for the troubling of the water that they might be cleansed and be made whole again.
 The intercession of St. Anne is sought by the healthy, praying for some temporal blessing, as we'll as by the sick.
 The first woolen cloths manufactur- ed in England were produced by colony of seventy families of Dutch cloth-workers who landed in Eng land on this date. July 26, in the year 13s1 having bee-a induced to settle in England by a liberal grant from Ed ward III worsted manufacture was commenced In Norfolk a few years later and the industry launched soon reached large proportions, Every effort was made to protect the infant industry, and in 146s 1t was enacted that no cloth but of Wales or Ire- land should be imported into Eng land In the seventeenth century, during the reign of Charles II, a law waa passed that all persons should