Much relieved that Doña Barbara left it for her to put her darlings to bed, Tia Marta listened demurely to all their drowsy wonder-tales of cascades of fire, showers of falling stars, flaming rivers flowing through the night, golden trees blossoming with rubies and emeralds and amethysts, the colossal lizard that sprang up with a crash, turning to a glistening green dragon that tried to chase the stars, and, best of all, a million-tinted Alhambra which changed, in one splendid instant, to lustrous silver, to an intense and awful white, and then vanished, with a series of deafening thunders, as a sign of Santiago’s victory over the Moors. Yes, Tia Marta listened to everything they could keep awake long enough to tell her, and never once confessed how she had seen all this, and more, from the roof of the house, with Pedrillo sitting close beside her, his hand over hers, to reassure her in case the explosions should be too loud for Andalusian nerves to bear. The _fiesta_ lasted for several days. There were solemn ceremonies in the cathedral, stately processions through the streets, fairs, sports, open-air music and dancing. Pilarica’s height of rapture was reached when the King of Censers, the great, silver incense-burner of the Middle Ages, swung by a system of chains and pulleys from the vaulting of the central cupola, flashed its majestic curves through the cathedral, a tremendous fire-bird dipping and rising in a cloud of fragrance over the upturned faces of the vast, hushed congregation. But Rafael took a boy’s delight in the eight giants, hollow wicker images some twelve feet high, representing mediæval pilgrims, Moors, Turks and modern tourists, an absurd array that strutted at the head of the processions and even danced, to the music of pipe and tabor, before the High Altar. He was puzzled to understand how they were propelled until he saw peering out at him from the waistband of that chief booby, John Bull, the rueful face of Hilario. A teasing troop of dwarfs were trying to trip and upset this particularly clumsy giant, and Rafael struck in gallantly to the rescue, serving Hilario at cost of a bloody nose. He pelted the dwarfs with melon rinds, while Bastiano, concealed inside the British Matron, John Bull’s towering escort, gathered up his calico petticoats and pounded at them with his pasteboard head. Rafael described this, with high glee, at the supper table, but, remembering Don Juan Bolondron, was silent as to his own exploits.