the
carriage to enter the house of some infirm person, the soldiers perform
those military honours which already have been described, and during the
performance the band plays the royal march. In some parishes, the
proprietor of the carriage, or one of his principal people, assumes, _pro
hac vice_, the office of coachman.

Under the title of processions may conveniently be placed those of the
funerals of such persons as have left sufficient funds to defray the
expenses exacted by the church on such occasions. Until within a very
few years ago, it was the custom to convey the body to the dead-house of
the church, with the face uncovered, in some religious habit, which was
called the shroud (_la mortaja_), and the body was borne on the shoulders
of the brotherhood of some society. Now-a-days, however, it is usual to
convey it in a closed coffin, and on a funeral car. In Madrid, some of
these cars are on such a scale of luxury and sculpture as but ill accords
with the character and nature of the ceremony. The body is preceded by
the poor of the charitable institutions, with lighted candles or tapers
in their hands; and the clergy follow it, chanting the office for the
dead. The undertaker is a personage entirely unknown in Spain. The
church takes possession of the body, and keeps it until the time of
interment, and the bill of expenses for the offices which the church
performs frequently amounts to a sum absolutely ruinous. There is a
Spanish city of which it is recorded that no sooner has a person breathed
his last sigh, than the surviving family are importuned by deputations
from the different religious communities, offering their respective
services to conduct the interment on the cheapest scale of prices.

We have several times had occasion to allude to the strange contrast
formed in Spain between the superstitious character of Roman Catholicism
there professed, and the mockery which, at the same time, is made of the
most sacred objects and venerated practices. The most notable example
which we have of this moral phenomenon is _The funeral of the sprat_, or,
as called in Spain, _El entierro de la sardina_, which is performed
yearly in Madrid. On Ash-Wednesday, the day on which the follies of the
carnival cease, and on which the people proceed, at once, from dancing
and revelling, to the church, to receive the ashes which the priest rubs
in form of a cross on the forehead of every believer, and in the evening