thern wares, is dingy
enough by day, but after dark on Christmas Eve it looks like a bit of
Naples. The windows are gay with lights and coloured festoons, there are
lantern-decked sweetmeat stalls, one old man has a _presepio_ in his
room, other people have little altars or shrines with candles burning,
and bright pictures of saints adorn the walls. It is a strangely pathetic
sight, this _festa_ of the children of the South, this attempt to keep an
Italian Christmas amid the cold damp dreariness of a London slum. The
colony has its own church, San Pietro, copied from some Renaissance
basilica at Rome, a building half tawdry, half magnificent, which
transports him who enters it far away to the South. Like every Italian
church, it is |117| at once the Palace of the Great King and the refuge
of the humblest--no other church in London is quite so intimately the
home of the poor. Towards twelve o'clock on Christmas Eve the deep-toned
bell of San Pietro booms out over the colony, and the people crowd to the
Midnight Mass, and pay their devotions at a great _presepio_ set up for
the veneration of the faithful. When on the Octave of the Epiphany[40]
the time comes to close the crib, an impressive and touching ceremony
takes place. The afternoon Benediction over, the priest, with the
acolytes, goes to the _presepio_ and returns to the chancel with the
_Bambino_. Holding it on his arm, he preaches in Italian on the story of
the Christ Child. The sermon ended, the notes of "Adeste, fideles" are
heard, and while the Latin words are sung the faithful kneel at the altar
rails and reverently kiss the Holy Babe. It is their farewell to the
_Bambino_ till next Christmas.

* * * * *

A few details may here be given about the religious customs at Christmas
in Spain. The Midnight Mass is there the great event of the festival.
Something has already been said as to its celebration in Madrid. The
scene at the midnight service in a small Andalusian country town is thus
described by an English traveller:--"The church was full; the service
orderly; the people of all classes. There were muleteers, wrapped in
their blue and white checked rugs; here, Spanish gentlemen, enveloped in
their graceful capas, or capes ... here, again, were crowds of the
commonest people,--miners, fruitsellers, servants, and the like,--the
women kneeling on the rush matting of the dimly-lit church, the men
standing in dark masses behind, or