ng, for it was precisely midnight,
and the priest at the altar began to say the Christmas Masses. When he
had reached the Gospel, he was interrupted by the appearance of a
matron, dressed all in white, who stood at the end of the nave. She was
clad like the Madonna, and was accompanied by Joseph, who wore the garb
of a mountaineer, with a hatchet in his hand. An officious little
officer with a halberd opened the way through the crowd before these
personages, and they came solemnly up the aisle towards the chancel,
which had been arrayed to represent Bethlehem, the Madonna reciting, as
she moved forward, a plaintive song about her homelessness. Joseph
replied cheeringly, and led her under a roof of leaves in the sanctuary,
formed in the manner of a stable, in which we could see the manger
against the wall. Here she took rest from her journey, while a little
crib, wherein lay the Bambino--or waxen image of the Babe--all adorned
with ribbons and laces, was brought from the sacristy and placed in the
straw at her feet.

As the Madonna passed us, Jose Rosado nudged me, and whispered audibly
enough to make the crowd about us turn and stare,--

"Hist! here's the Donna Isabella, senor! She looks like a saint
to-night!"

I watched her closely as she went by me, and marked, under the meek
expression assumed by the Virgin, a more characteristic one of severe
resolution. She was, however, a queenly woman, in the ripest stage of
maturity, but she bore herself, in the part she had taken, with a
matronly grace something too conscious for the lowly Mary.

As she seated herself on the heap of straw, a little boy in a surplice,
representing an angel, with wings of crimped lawn at his shoulders, was
raised in a chair, by a cord and pulley, to the very top of the
sanctuary arch, where he sang a carol to the shepherds,--

"Shepherds, hasten all
With flying feet from your retreat;
On rustic pipes now play
Your sweetest, sweetest lay;

for"--so ran the song--"Mary and the King of Heaven are in yonder cave."

At this, an orchestra, concealed behind the high altar, set up a tooting
from bagpipes, and flute, and violin, which served as a prelude to the
appearance of the shepherds, who were concealed in the gallery.

Up they got, with long cloaks and crooked staffs, murmuring their
surprise and incredulity at what the angel had said; some pretending to
grumble at being awakened from sleep, others anxious to prove the tru