The small room was filled with people. We squeezed into an already overcrowded pew, and kneeling, I was almost drugged with the clouds of incense, and the hot, close air. At the altar, the red-robed priest, very old and frail, intoned the ceremonial service. A full-grown altar-"boy," black as his robes, and slippered, swung the heavy censer, and looked over the audience for possible disturbances. They occurred more than once. The brown babies cooed or cried, according to their several temperaments; a mongrel dog ran in and out of the pews, at a late-comer's heels; and here and there, a black-eyed girl looked over her shoulder at some responsive cavalier who stood or knelt with the many worshippers lining the walls. There was an amazing, almost tangible spirit in the place: a mingling of childlike devotion and equally childlike theatricalism. The people came to the service, like children to a parent, wholly natural, wholly simple, and yet not wholly devoid of a certain dramatic instinct and, above all, keenly sensitive to the sweet-scented vapor, the well-worn lace and vestments of the priest, the solemn intonation of the Mass. Bright-winged birds flew astonishingly in and out of the open-shuttered windows: the consumptive organ wheezed and muttered: the voices of the people rose with a grave eagerness upon the heavy air. And here and there an adventurous ray of sunshine fell alike on old and young heads, lingered on the gay colors of the girls' dresses, slid like a finger of gold over the red-robed priest at the little altar, and danced across the heavy, smoky rafters of the ceiling. Mercedes, her lovely face hidden, told her silver and pearl rosary. Wright, after his first moment of embarrassment and instinctive recoil from so much massed humanity, was engrossed in her, in his surroundings. I imagined I saw a picture shaping--a little more tender, a little more serious than anything he had done yet. And I, kneeling in the stuffy chapel with an alien people of a different expression of Faith, felt for the first time in many, many hours, a sense of release, of peace, a cooling touch on my hot and aching heart. Mass over, the people poured, laughing, talking, gesticulating out into the thick, yellow sunshine. The half-flirtations which had deflected the thoughts of some of the younger worshippers, were renewed and pursued. A young mother sat on the steps of the church and bared her brown breast to her baby's fumbling lips. She looked a deep-eyed Madonna, as she sat there, unconscious of the people around her, a white mantilla framing her face. Her husband, a clean-featured man, taller than the average Cuban, stood behind her, smoking, his coarse white trousers dazzling in the sunshine, his bright purple "American" shirt worn like a smock, after the "dress" regulations of Guayabal on Sunday.