Free Tales From Gavagan's Bar by L. Sprague de Camp, Fletcher Pratt

they have; but the food isn't bad, and I picked up some nice antiques and everything was going the way it should until I got to a place called Pas d'Ange, up on the Benoit River. They have a famous shrine there, run by the Benedictine monks, in a chapel. You know those monks have a choir, too, a real good one.
     
                  Now I write poetry that is supposed to have religious aspects, and I try to behave like a good Christian to other people, but I don't usually go into a church from one year's end to another, and I don't suppose I would have gone into the one at Pas d'Ange except that I got there in the afternoon when it was too late to push on to the next town. I'd exhausted all my reading matter, and there wasn't anything else in the place to see.
     
                  So I went to the chapel, and sat down in one of the pews. Outside it was a beautiful fall day without a breath of wind. The light came in through stained glass that was really beautiful for so small a place; and as I sat there, I had a wonderful feeling of peace and calm, perhaps the kind of feeling religion is supposed to give you. I sat there a long time, not thinking of anything—in words, that is. After a while, the light began to fade. I got up to go; and at the same time the feeling I spoke of left me, as though a charm had somehow been broken; and I had only the memory instead of the thing itself. I had just begun working with the back of my mind on my poem for the next week, when at the door I met a little priest, just coming in.
     
                  He spoke to me in French. I know the language fairly well, but that Canadian French has such a peculiar accent that it was hard to make out what he was saying. I finally made out that he was inviting me to stay for the evening service, with the choir. By this time I was getting hungry and the beginning of my next week's poem was nagging me, so I tried to refuse; but he looked so unhappy that I finally gave in and went back with him. As I did so, he said something I didn't quite catch; something about unexpected blessings, and then left me there.
     
                  The choir was all it was said to be; and with the monks chanting and the incense rising in the dusk, the feeling—sort of holy and reverent, if you know what I mean, as though I were lighter than air and could rise right up through the roof—the feeling partly came back, but only in flashes, because all the time I was worrying about my poem. I couldn't seem to get beyond the first two lines:
     
                  God give me a child, a tree, a flower; God give me a bird for just one hour-After the service was over, I didn't see the little priest again; and after that I was so busy seeing things and finding roads that the poem I hadn't written dropped out of my mind until I got back to town. Then the sight of the streets and stores I knew reminded me that I had a deadline to meet. I started trying to think it out while I was putting the car away, beginning with the same lines as before. As I was going up in the elevator, the two lines reminded me of the scene in the chapel; and I had another flash of the same sense, almost ecstasy you would call it, that I had experienced sitting in the chapel.
     
                  The minute I opened the door of the apartment, I knew something was wrong. I heard a squall. I rushed into my living room, and there it was—a newborn baby squirming around on my carpet and yelling its head off. The rest of it was there, too—a young oak tree that seemed to be growing right out of the floor, reaching to the ceiling; a freshly-cut rose lying on my desk; and a yellow oriole in the branches of the tree.
     
                  Yes, make me another, Mr. Cohan. You people need to realize that it's one thing to spend years telling God how much you want a child and quite another to find all of a sudden that you have one. In the first place,