yal
crown was punched out of the middle of the national flag. She is
political here, and is not shy of declaring her opinions. Ladies of the
better classes of Cadiz are attentive to the duties of their religion;
kneeling figures gracefully draped in black may be seen at all hours of
the day in the churches during this Lenten season, telling their beads
or turning over their missals. Those ladies are Carlist to a man, as
Paddy would say; they naturally exert an influence over their husbands,
though the influence falls short of making their husbands accompany them
to church except on great festivals such as Easter Sunday, or on what
may be called occasions of social rendezvous, such as a Requiem service
for a deceased friend. The men seem to be of one mind with the French
freethinker, who abjured religion himself, or put off thoughts of it
till his dying day, but pronounced it necessary for peasants and
wholesome for women and children. But _les femmes du peuple_, the
fishwives, the labourers' daughters, the bouncing young fruit-sellers,
and the like, are not religious in Cadiz. They have been bitten with the
revolutionary mania; they are staunch Red Republicans, and have the bump
of veneration as flat as the furies that went in procession to
Versailles at the period of the Great Revolution, or their great
granddaughters who fought on the barricades of the Commune. The nymphs
of the pavement sympathize strongly with the Republic likewise; but
their ideal of a Republic is not that of Senores Castelar and Figueras.
They want bull-fights and distribution of property, and object to all
religious confraternities unless based on the principles of "the Monks
of the Screw," whose charter-song, written by that wit in wig and gown,
Philpot Curran, was of the least ascetic:

"My children, be chaste--till you're tempted;
While sober, be wise and discreet,
And humble your bodies with--fasting,
Whene'er you have nothing to eat."

So long ago as 1834 a sequestration of convents was ordered in Spain,
but the Gaditanos never had the courage to enforce the decree till
after the revolution that sent Queen Isabella into exile. A few years
ago the convent of Barefooted Carmelites on the Plaza de los Descalzados
was pulled down; the decree that legalized the act provided an
indemnity, but the unfortunate monks who were turned bag and baggage out
of their house never got a penny. They have had to humble their bodies
wi