Note 1 — PREFACE.

A certain humble friend, however, used time after time so to impress me with the fancy that she had all the qualifications for being a valuable repository of such lore if it only existed, that I was finally led to examine her on the subject. She gave me a capital opportunity one day when, during a visit to a bedridden cripple whom she nursed, she was flapping the dust off the pictures and ornaments with a feather-brush according to the Roman idea of dusting. ‘I never do any dusting,’ she said the while, ‘but I always think of Monsignor Delegato dusting the altar of the holy house of Loreto. And now I think of it, he was not called Monsignor Delegato, but Monsignor Commissario. But every evening of my life while I was young and living at Loreto, I have seen him dust the altar of the Santa Casa at 23 o’clock,1 before they shut up the church, saying a Salve Regina for the benefactors of the spot.’ If she was so familiar with Loreto, I concluded, and had so noticed and remembered its customs, probably she was not ignorant of its Legends either, and I commenced my inquisition at once.