itional 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.

Still watching from our hotel-window, turn now from the sham
picturesqueness of the Church to the real and unconscious
picturesqueness of every day. It is the orange-season, and beneath us
streams an endless procession of men, women, and children, each bearing
on the head a great graceful basket of yellow treasures. Opposite our
window there is a wall by which they rest themsel