When they had all gone in, my wine-dresser, who was a courageous fellow, crawled up to the door and there beheld a most marvellous spectacle. All these good shadows sat around the choir in the ruined nave just as though the benches were still there. There were fine ladies in brocades and lace head-dresses, lords gayly bedizened, peasants in flowered coats like those our grandfathers wore, all of them dusty, faded, weary. Every now and then, some night-bird, an habitual lodger in the chapel, awakened by all these lights, began to flutter about the tapers, whose flames rose erect and vague as though they were burning behind a strip of gauze. Garrigue was particularly amused at a gentleman with great steel spectacles, who constantly shook his huge black wig, upon which perched one of these birds with entangled claws and beating wings. A little old man with a childlike figure knelt in the centre of the choir and frantically shook a tiny bell which had lost its voice, while a priest clad in old-gold vestments moved hither and thither before the altar repeating orisons of which not a syllable could be heard. Who could this have been but Dom Balaguère, saying his third Low Mass? [Illustration] THE POET'S CHRISTMAS EVE. From the Spanish of PEDRO A. DE ALARCÓN. In a beautiful corner of Andalusia Lies a smiling valley. God bless it! For in that valley Have I friends, loves, Brothers, parents. (_El Látigo._) I. A good many years ago, for I was then only seven, my father came to me in the twilight of a winter's day, when the three _Ave Marias_ had been repeated to the sound of the church-bells, and said solemnly, "You need not go to bed with the chickens to-night, Pedro; you are a big boy now, and you ought to have supper with your parents and your older brothers. This is Christmas Eve." I shall never forget the delight with which I heard these words. I was not going to bed until late! I cast a glance of commiseration and contempt upon my younger brothers, and instantly fell to composing a description, to be delivered at school on my return after Twelfth Night, of this my first adventure, my first lark, the first dissipation of my life. II. It was already _las Ánimas_,[1] as they say in our village. [1] A certain hour of the evening, when the ringing of bells admonishes the faithful to pray for the souls in purgatory. Our village! Ninety leagues from Madrid, a thousand leagues from the world, nestling in a fold of the Sierra Nevada! I can almost fancy I see you, brothers, father, and mother!