“St. James brought nine disciples with him to Spain,” writes Molina. We will leave his account of the great hospital erected for the pilgrims till another chapter. He devotes many pages to a careful description of the arms of the great families of Galicia, and with them of the arms of St. James. “The reason why the pilgrims wear a scallop-shell as the insignum of St. James,” he explains, “is that a certain nobleman, who wished to accompany the body of the Apostle to Galicia, not finding a passage in the ship, entered the sea on horseback, and thus reached Galicia. As he came out of the water it was found that his body and that of his horse were covered with scallop-shells. And now, the pilgrim who does not bring scallop-shells back with him is not believed to have been to Santiago at all.” The crowding of the pilgrims to Mass was so great in the early years of the seventeenth century, that the priest, after administering the Holy Communion in the Chapel of the King of France, administered it in the nave, in the transept, in the cloisters, and even in the large square which is now called _Plaza de los Literarios_, but which was then called the _La Quintana_. All these places were tightly packed with pilgrims. As late as the year 1706, altars were temporarily erected in the cloister for the priest to say Mass. In 1794, D. Miguel Ferro, Architect of the Cathedral, wrote: “The crowd of pilgrims on the great feast days is so large, that only two-thirds of them can get into the Cathedral, apart from the families who live in the town.”[87] “Since then,” wrote Sanchez in 1888, “the revolutions which inaugurated the present epoch, and the spirit of religious indifference which has unfortunately affected modern minds, have influenced the decadence of pilgrimages to Santiago; they are now only the shadow of what they were.... To-day, nevertheless, we feel the fervour and enthusiasm of bygone days is once more growing.... With the discovery of the Sacred Relics of the Apostle, Santiago appears at certain epochs to recover her former appearance. Never shall we forget the 29th of June 1883, on which, staff in hand, and on foot, and chanting hymns, there arrived at the sacred portal of the Cathedral a company of Augustine friars, who had been unjustly forced to leave France, their mother country. Shortly after their arrival we witnessed that of another band of pilgrims, composed of students from the Catholic University of Paris, and most of whom belonged to the noblest families of France.”