Visitors to the shrine of Santiago seldom fail to have their curiosity excited by the monster "smoke-thrower" (_bota-fumeiro_) or incensory, lowered (much like the deadly sword in Poe's exciting tale) on each _fiesta_ by a batch of vigorous Gallegos from an iron frame fixed into the pendentives of the dome. "The calmest heart," says Villa-amil, "grows agitated to behold this giant vessel descending from the apex of the nave until it almost sweeps the ground, wreathed in dense smoke and spewing flame." Ford seems to have been unaware that the real purpose of this metal monster was not to simply scent the holy precincts, but to cover up the pestilential atmosphere created by a horde of verminous, diseased, and evil-smelling pilgrims, who, by a usage which is now suppressed, were authorized to pass the night before the services within the actual cathedral wall. The original _bota-fumeiro_, resembling, in Oxea's words, "a silver boiler of gigantic bulk," was lost or stolen in the War of Spanish Independence. It was replaced by another of iron, and this, in 1851, by the present apparatus of white metal. Striking objects of ecclesiastical _orfebrería_ were produced in Spain throughout the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries. Among the finest are the triptych-reliquary of Seville cathedral known as the _Alfonsine Tables_; the _retablo_ and _baldaquino_ of the cathedral of Gerona; the silver throne, preserved in Barcelona cathedral, of Don Martin of Aragon; and the _guión_, at Toledo, of Cardinal Mendoza. [Illustration: IX MUDEJAR TRIPTYCH (_Interior of one leaf of the door. 14th Century. Royal Academy of History, Madrid_)]