It is in communities like this that Jesuit humbuggery flourishes.  We visited a Jesuit cathedral nearly two hundred years old and found in it a piece of the veritable cross upon which our Saviour was crucified.  It was polished and hard, and in as excellent a state of preservation as if the dread tragedy on Calvary had occurred yesterday instead of eighteen centuries ago.  But these confiding people believe in that piece of wood unhesitatingly.

In a chapel of the cathedral is an altar with facings of solid silver—­at least they call it so, and I think myself it would go a couple of hundred to the ton (to speak after the fashion of the silver miners)—­and before it is kept forever burning a small lamp.  A devout lady who died, left money and contracted for unlimited masses for the repose of her soul, and also stipulated that this lamp should be kept lighted always, day and night.  She did all this before she died, you understand.  It is a very small lamp and a very dim one, and it could not work her much damage, I think, if it went out altogether.

The great altar of the cathedral and also three or four minor ones are a perfect mass of gilt gimcracks and gingerbread.  And they have a swarm of rusty, dusty, battered apostles standing around the filagree work, some on one leg and some with one eye out but a gamey look in the other, and some with two or three fingers gone, and some with not enough nose left to blow—­all of them crippled and discouraged, and fitter subjects for the hospital than the cathedral.

The walls of the chancel are of porcelain, all pictured over with figures of almost life size, very elegantly wrought and dressed in the fanciful costumes of two centuries ago.  The design was a history of something or somebody, but none of us were learned enough to read the story.  The old father, reposing under a stone close by, dated 1686, might have told us if he could have risen.  But he didn’t.

As we came down through the town we encountered a squad of little donkeys ready saddled for use.  The saddles were peculiar, to say the least.  They consisted of a sort of saw-buck with a small mattress on it, and this furniture covered about half the donkey.  There were no stirrups, but really such supports were not needed—­to use such a saddle was the next thing to riding a dinner table—­there was ample support clear out to one’s knee joints.  A pack of ragged Portuguese muleteers crowded around us, offering their beasts at half a dollar an hour—­more rascality to the stranger, for the market price is sixteen cents.  Half a dozen of us mounted the ungainly affairs and submitted to the indignity of making a ridiculous spectacle of ourselves through the principal streets of a town of 10,000 inhabitants.