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MEXICO. 



rattles, and required both hands to wield. Many of* the 

 stalls in the Plaza Mayor were devoted to their sale 

 alone ; while others dealt in nothing but effigies of Judas 

 Iscariot, varying in size and monstrosity, from a doll of 

 a foot long, to the size of the human figure. Hundreds 

 of them were seen tied together by the neck, and dang- 

 ling from long poles by twenty and thirty in a cluster, 

 over the heads of the mob. 



At the corner of the market, nearest the plaza, where 

 it happened that the principal rattle venders had en- 

 sconced themselves, if you shut your eyes, you might 

 imagine yourself after sunset in the depth of a forest in 

 the Floridas, where a few million grasshoppers, cicada, 

 and wood bugs were at their serenade. 



And so it continued from sunrise to sunset. I believe 

 myself within bounds when I assert that we saw fifty 

 thousand people collected in the great square morning 

 and evening. Sometimes the mass was so dense that 

 the booths were threatened with an overturn ; and you 

 were glad to gain the step of one of the palaces, from 

 which you might look over the sea of heads at your ease, 

 and descry the bunches of Judases hideously besmeared 

 with red and blue paint, bobbing about over the level of 

 the multitude. Then would come a stir at the other end 

 of the square : and, with a long-drawn train of crucifixes, 

 decorated banners and tapers, the clergy of one of the 

 great churches to the westward would defile into the 

 crowded area ; clearing their uninterrupted way, as 

 though by magic, to the great entrance of the cathedral, 

 through a press where, a moment before, a dog could 

 hardly have wormed his way. Some of these proces- 

 sions on the afternoon of Good Friday were more gor- 

 geous and splendid in their aspect than any I had seen in 

 Italy itself, and apparently interminable. They were 

 revolting from the hideous and disgusting representations 

 which they comprised, of the sacred scenes of the Pas- 

 sion. During the passage, the whole mass of human be- 

 ings collected on the Plaza Mayor remained kneeling in 

 silence. To what divinity ? My brain swims with the 

 recollection of the press and glare, and the confused and 



