Perhaps it is a procession-day, and all the saints of some church are taken out for an airing.  They are figures composed of wood and wax, life-size, and in full costume, each having a complete separate wardrobe, but more tawdry and shabby, let us hope, than the originals ever indulged in.  Here are Saint Francis and Saint Isabella, Saint Peter with a monk kneeling before him, and Saint Margaret with her dog, and the sceptred and ermined Saint Louis, and then Joseph and Mary sitting amicably upon the same platform, with an additional force of bearers to sustain them.  For this is the procession of the Bem-casados or Well-married, in honor of the parents of Jesus.  Then there are lofty crucifixes and waving flags; and when the great banner, bearing simply the letters S.P.Q.R., comes flapping round the windy corner, one starts in wonder at the permanent might of that vast superstition which has grasped the very central symbol of ancient empire, and brought it down, like a boulder on a glacier, into modern days.  It makes all Christianity seem but a vast palimpsest, since the letters which once meant “Senatus Populusque Romanus” stand now only for the feebler modern formula, “Salve populum quem redemisti.”

All these shabby splendors are interspersed among the rank and file of two hundred, or thereabouts, lay brethren of different orders, ranging in years from six to sixty.  The Carmelites wear a sort of white bathing-dress, and the Brotherhood of Saint Francis are clothed in long brown robes, girded with coarse rope.  The very old and the very young look rather picturesque in these disguises,—­the latter especially, urchins with almost baby-faces, toddling along with lighted candle in hand; and one often feels astonished to recognize some familiar porter or shopkeeper in this ecclesiastical dress, as when discovering a pacific next-door neighbor beneath the bear-skin of an American military officer.  A fit suggestion; for next follows a detachment of Portuguese troops-of-the-line,—­twenty shambling men in short jackets, with hair shaved close, looking most like children’s wooden monkeys, by no means live enough for the real ones.  They straggle along, scarcely less irregular in aspect than the main body of the procession; they march to the tap of the drum.  I never saw a Fourth-of-July procession in the remotest of our rural districts which was not beautiful, compared to this forlorn display; but the popular homage is duly given, the bells jangle incessantly, and, as the procession passes, all men uncover their heads or have their hats knocked off by official authority.