a hissing sound and a sputter of sparks, between the two hedges of eager spectators.  If all goes well, the bird pursues its course along the wire and out at the door, and in another moment a prolonged series of fizzes, pops and bangs announces to the excited crowd in the cathedral that the fireworks on the car are going off.  Great is the joy accordingly, especially among the bumpkins, who are now sure of an abundant harvest.  But if, as sometimes happens, the dove stops short in its career and fizzles out, revealing itself as a stuffed bird with a packet of squibs tied to its tail, great is the consternation, and deep the curses that issue from between the set teeth of the clodhoppers, who now give up the harvest for lost.  Formerly the unskilful mechanician who was responsible for the failure would have been clapped into gaol; but nowadays he is thought sufficiently punished by the storm of public indignation and the loss of his pay.  The disaster is announced by placards posted about the streets in the evening; and next morning the newspapers are full of gloomy prognostications.[315]

[The new fire and burning of Judas on Easter Saturday in Mexico.]

Some of these customs have been transported by the Catholic Church to the New World.  Thus in Mexico the new fire is struck from a flint early in the morning of Easter Saturday, and a candle which has been lighted at the sacred flame is carried through the church by a deacon shouting “Lumen Christi.”  Meantime the whole city, we are informed, has been converted into a vast place of execution.  Ropes stretch across the streets from house to house, and from every house dangles an effigy of Judas, made of paper pulp.  Scores or hundreds of them may adorn a single street.  They are of all shapes and sizes, grotesque in form and garbed in strange attire, stuffed with gunpowder, squibs and crackers, sometimes, too, with meat, bread, soap, candy, and clothing, for which the crowd will scramble and scuffle while the effigies are burning.  There they hang grim, black, and sullen in the strong sunshine, greeted with a roar of execration by the pious mob.  A peal of bells from the cathedral tower on the stroke of noon gives the signal for the execution.  At the sound a frenzy seizes the crowd.  They throw themselves furiously on the figures of the detested traitor, cut them down, hurl them with curses into the fire, and fight and struggle with each other in their efforts to tear the effigies to tatters and appropriate their contents.  Smoke, stink, sputter of crackers, oaths, curses, yells are now the order of the day.  But the traitor does not perish unavenged.  For the anatomy of his frame has been cunningly contrived so as in burning to discharge volleys of squibs into his assailants; and the wounds and burns with which their piety is rewarded form a feature of the morning’s entertainment.  The English Jockey Club in Mexico used to improve on this popular pastime by suspending