To this day in central France, when the seed is sown in the spring and the husbandman has trusted his labour and his grain to the uncertain season, the image of Our Lady of Mercy is solemnly carried through the prepared fields, with song and prayer, that her blessing may rest upon them, and the grain return a hundred-fold. Far away from France and Germany, up in the chilly valleys of the Peruvian Andes, when the natives used to fear, for their crops, killing frost or withering drought, the sacred _huaca_, the divine guardian of the village, was brought forth and carried in solemn procession around the fields, and its intercession beseeched in moving cries and with abundant gifts.[223] Numberless other examples of this universal rite might be mentioned, a rite the shadow of which still falls among us in the processional and recessional of high Protestant churches. Among primitive peoples and in the folk-lore of modern nations, it develops into the forms which are known as “the sinistral and dextral circuits,” depending on whether the procession is from right to left or the reverse, connected doubtless with the motion of the celestial bodies, and with the reverse of that motion, each appropriate to certain forms of worship. Throughout the American tribes this is always a point of the greatest importance, and constantly appears, not merely in their religious exercises, but in their social customs, their arts, and their habits of life.[224] I mentioned that the old Romans used to consider theatrical entertainments a proper part of a religious ceremony. They were not alone in that. In fact, the opinion was so universal that students of literary origins are agreed that the beginning of the drama, both comedy and tragedy, was in sacred scenic representations of the supposed doings of the gods. We may recognise the earliest form of the drama in the masked actors of the American Indian medicine dances. They usually take the part of some lower animal, comic or serious, the face concealed either with a part of its hide, or with a wooden mask, on which is painted some semblance or symbol of the animal. The language of the actor is appropriate to his rôle, and often involves curious modifications of the customary tongue, to suit the creature he represents.[225] Long before the discovery of America by Columbus the native tribes of Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru had developed from this source a dramatic literature, which, like that of the early Greek classic period, had thrown off its first, purely religious garb, and had developed into an independent art, devoted equally to Melpomene and Thalia, the tragic and the comic muses.