We Were There On None Of These Dates, And, Far
More Regretably, Not On The Day Of Corpus Christi, When
Those boys whose
effigies in sculptured and painted wood we had seen in the museum at
Valladolid pace in their
Mystic dance before the people at the opposite
portal of the cathedral. But I appoint any reader, so minded, to go and
witness the rite some springtime for me. There is no hurry, for it is
destined to endure through the device practised in defeating the pope
who proposed to abolish it. He ordained that it should continue only as
long as the boys' actual costumes lasted; but by renewing these
carefully wherever they began to wear out, they have become practically
imperishable.
If we missed this attraction of the cathedral, we had the high good
fortune to witness another ceremony peculiar to it, but perhaps less
popularly acceptable. The building had often suffered from earthquakes,
and on the awful day, _dies irae,_ of the great Lisbon earthquake,
during mass and at the moment of the elevation of the Host, when the
worshipers were on their knees, there came such a mighty shock in
sympathy with the far-off cataclysm that the people started to their
feet and ran out of the cathedral. If the priests ran after them, as
soon as the apparent danger was past they led the return of their flock
and resumed the interrupted rite. It was, of course, by a miracle that
the temple was spared, and when it was realized how scarcely Seville had
escaped the fate of Lisbon it was natural that the event should be
dramatized in a perpetual observance.
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