When we had visited the gardens and the stables, our young monk brought us back to the great church of the convent, where we took our places near the monks, who had mustered in full force to be present at the dancing. Presently the music arrived, an old man with a harp, and a woman with a violin; and then came the dancers, eight Indian boys with short tunics and head-dresses of feathers, and as many girls with white dresses, and garlands of flowers on their heads. The costumes were evidently intended to represent the Indian dresses of the days of Montezuma, but they were rather modernized by the necessity of wearing various articles of dress which would have been superfluous in old times. They stationed themselves in the middle of the church, opposite the high altar, and, to our unspeakable astonishment, began to dance the polka. Then came a waltz, then a schottisch, then another waltz, and finally a quadrille, set to unmitigated English tunes. They danced exceedingly well, and behaved as though they had been used to European ball-rooms all their lives. The spectators looked on as though it were all a matter of course for these brown-skinned boys and girls to have acquired so singular an accomplishment in their out-of-the-way village among the mountains. As for us we looked on in open-mouthed astonishment; and when, in the middle of the quadrille, the harp and violin struck up no less a tune than “The King of the Cannibal Islands,” we could hardly help bursting out into fits of laughter. We restrained ourselves, however, and kept as grave a countenance as the rest of the lookers-on, who had not the faintest idea that anything odd was happening. The quadrille finished in perfect order; each dancer took his partner by the hand and led her forward; and so, forming a line in front of the high altar, they all knelt down, and the rest of the congregation followed their example; there was a dead silence in the church for about the space of an Ave Maria, then everyone rose, and the ceremony was over.[18] [18] The Aztecs were accustomed, before the Conquest, to perform dances as part of the celebration of their religious festivals, and the missionaries allowed them to continue the practice after their conversion. The dance in a church, described by Mr. Bullock in 1822, was a much more genuine Indian ceremony than the one which we saw. Church-dancing may be seen in Europe even at the present day. The solemn Advent dances in Seville cathedral were described to me, by an eyewitness, as consisting of minuets, or some such stately old-fashioned dances, performed in front of the high altar by boys in white surplices, with the greatest gravity and decorum.