Gérôme's "Duel after the Bal Masqué," but on a more liberal scale--Polichinelle pierced by a bayonet-thrust, the floured face of Pierrot streaked with blood, and poor Jack Pudding sprawling in the death-agonies in the gutter. The festivities were prolonged to the small hours of the night, or rather of the morning, none the less vigorously for the passing fear-spasm in the Prado; the masked balls at the theatres were packed with guests who enjoyed themselves, or fancied they did, which is as much as one can reasonably expect in this mundane sphere sometimes. The "Marseillaise" from a vibrating brass band might be heard, nay almost felt, crashing through the glass-doors and bursting in a cataract of sound through the drapery at the entrances of the café on the ground-floor of the Fonda de Paris at the hour when honest burgesses should be _tête-à-tête_ with the pillow. On Ash Wednesday, which rose rainily, there was an augmentation in the average of headaches, and a rise in the rates for apothecary's stuff. The pious revellers went (with an interval for washing and change of clothes) from the ball-room to the churches to receive the ashes. "Remember, man, thou art but dust, and unto dust thou shalt return," says the priest, and smears their foreheads with the cinders of last year's palm-branches. Another custom, peculiar to the date, the "entierro de la sardina," was duly observed by those wicked rogues, the non-pious revellers. The sardina is not the fish, but a portion of the intestines of a pig, which is laid to earth with pseudo-lamentation in token of _carne vale_, farewell to flesh-meat for forty days. With a lugubrious affectation of grief the funeral pageant passed. It was very profane--an undissembled mockery of a religious procession. A banner striped pink and yellow and inscribed "á los Cubanos" was carried in front by a fellow in West Indian negro dress with blackened face. Next came a troop of blackened acolytes, two by two, and then a canopy such as is borne over the Host, which canopy was held in travesty of homage over a beer-keg. A sacrilegious choir, chanting a parody of a Gregorian hymn, paced behind, and a gigantic blackguard, the _serpent du village_, supplied a droning accompaniment from a bassoon. A blackened high-priest, with a conical black hat and a cope bee-barred black and yellow, closed the burlesque train and made believe to read a mass-book through his pantomimic goggles. There was an attendant who rang a funeral bell, another who tapped a muffled drum, and a third who swung right under the nostrils of the onlookers a censer containing ground resin made vile to the smell by some fetid compound. Occasionally the profane rascals halted for a pull at a goat-skin of wine.