Chap. III. 
RUSTIC FESTIVALS. 
203 
church, which are attended by the greater part of the 
population, all clean and gaily dressed in calicos and 
muslins ; the girls wearing jasmines and other natural 
flo wers in their hair, no other head-dress being worn by 
females of any class. The evenings pass pleasantly ; the 
church is lighted up with wax candles, and illuminated 
on the outside by a great number of little oil lamps 
— rude clay cups, or halves of the thick rind of the 
bitter orange, which are fixed all over the front. The 
congregation seem very attentive, and the responses 
to the litany of Our Lady, sung by a couple of hundred 
fresh female voices, ring agreeably through the still 
village. Towards the end of the festival the fun com- 
mences. The managers of the feast keep open houses, 1^ 
and dancing, drumming, tinkling of wire guitars, and 
" unbridled drinking by both sexes, old and young, are 
kept up for a couple of days and a night with little inter- 
mission. The ways of the people at these merry-makings, 
of which there are many in the course of the year, always 
struck me as being not greatly difterent from those seen 
at an old-fashioned village wake in retired parts of 
England. The old folks look on and get very talkative 
over their cups ; the children are allowed a little extra 
indulgence in sitting up ; the dull, reserved fellows be- 
come loquacious, shake one another by the hand or slap 
each other on the back, discovering, all at once, what 
capital friends they are. The cantankerous individual 
gets quarrelsome, and the amorous unusually loving. 
The Indian, ordinarily so taciturn, finds the use of his 
tongue, and gives the minutest details of some little dis- 
pute which he had with his master years ago, and which 
