With such a cortege, the Christs gather in the portico of the church, awaiting the priest and the Christ who shall lead the procession, the one which is called the _Christ of the Indians_. When these issue from the church the procession is organized; the cross and the great candlesticks go before and then file by slowly and in good order some eight hundred or a thousand Christs with their retinues. Tixtla has some eight thousand inhabitants, hence there is a Christ to about each eight persons. This might well dismay an iconoclast. The procession passes through the more important streets, in the midst of the crowd gathered at the corners, the doors, windows and public squares. What a variety of images! It should be stated that not all represent crucifixes; there are also Christs with the cross on their shoulders, some simply stand, others of ‘Ecce-homos of the pillar,’ but these are few; the crucifixes are in majority. The sole respect in which all are equal is in the rude sculptural execution. There are some in which the chest muscles rise an inch above the ribs, others which have the neck of the size of the legs; some are the living portrait of _Gwinplaine_ or of _Quasimodo_; they smile lugubriously or they wink the half closed eyes with a grimace calculated to produce epilepsy. All have natural hair arrangement, the hair arrangement of the Indians, disordered, blown by the wind, tangled like a mass of serpents around the bleeding body of the Christ. As to size they vary from the colossal _Altepecristo_,[17] which the Indians hide in caverns, which is almost an idol of the old mythology, to the microscopic Christ which wee Indians of nine years carry with their thumb and forefinger, before which are burned tapers as slender as cigarettes. All the sizes, all the colors, all the meagerness of form, all the wounds, all the deformities, all the humped-backs, all the dislocations, all the absurdities which can be perpetrated in sculpture, are represented in this procession. When by the light of torches (for this procession ends at night), this immense line of suspended, behaired and bloody bodies is seen in movement, one might believe himself oppressed by a frightful nightmare or imagine himself traversing some forest of the middle ages in which a tribe of naked gypsies had been hung. Callot in his wild imagination never saw a procession more fantastic, more original. Yet this spectacle was the delight of my boyhood days! Then the Christs withdrew with their _padrinos_ and retinues to the houses whence they issued and there the family prepared a savory feast. The _atole_ of cornmeal called _champol_ and the sweet and delicate _totopos_. Ah, General Riva Palacio, never in thy days of campaign in Michoacan, have you had a more sumptuous banquet than that which you have enjoyed in the land of your fathers, an evening of the Christs--and of _champol_! VICTORIANO AGÜEROS. [Illustration]