her; and the fresh flowers she bade him gather were reminiscent of the acceptable offerings made of old upon her altar. The image of herself painted on his mantle, miraculously or otherwise, is not the likeness of the white Virgin of the Christians, but of one of his own dark-complexioned race, such a one as might be their Mother and ancient Protectress.

Was a trick, then, played upon the Bishop and the friars? Again, in Mexican phrase, Quien sabe?1 They were eager to believe in any miracle of the Virgin or the saints, and their credulity no doubt communicated itself to their converts. In the excitement of such a catastrophe as the Spanish conquest of Mexico people are voracious of wonders, and equally ready to deceive and to be deceived. If deception were required, there were Indians of the necessary ingenuity. Juan Diego and his uncle were people of rank in a race which had very nearly reached civilisation. It must not be forgotten that some classes of the Mexicans were extremely intelligent. True, they did not read and write, as we understand reading and writing; they did not use money or beasts of burden; and yet in several respects their political and ecclesiastical advancement was not far short of that of their conquerors. Their capital, for example, was better cleaned, lit, guarded, and supplied with water than contemporary Madrid, or even Paris or London. They made aqueducts and roads, and carved excellently in stone. And, although they knew nothing of the use of iron, they were, what is especially interesting to us here, extremely skilful in horticulture and in the art of painting upon cloth.

It was, then, a Mexican deity which the Catholic Church accepted, and whose local worship she afterwards sanctioned by apostolic authority. The Spanish Bishop, and by and by the Supreme Pontiff himself, recognised her as the Virgin Mary of the Catholic Church. But to the Indian she was the darkskinned Mother of his people and of their gods. The millions of the baptised were thus not weaned from their idolatry to the service of a new God. Deity and worshippers entered the Christian Church together. The Indian convert had been able to raise the brown Tonantzin to the rank of Deipara, the Mother of the Christian God, and to place her on the celestial throne above the Saints and Angels, as Queen of Heaven and Counsellor of the Saviour of the world.

Thus then the wholesale conversion of the Mexicans immediately after the conquest, took place only in the perfervid imagination of the friars. The people submitted to baptism with characteristic docility. But their actual conversion from paganism (1) Who knows?

to Christianity was scarcely begun, and few who, like the writer, have lived among them would be rash enough to say that, after a dozen generations, it is yet complete. The Church, no doubt, has had its success. By the middle of last century one-third of the whole real property in the country belonged to it. The white towers of the churches picturesquely dominate the towns, and every village has its templo or share of one. A little "patter' of new words, but no new idea, is taught in them. There are, as there always were, certain offences of omission or commission for which penalties have to be paid. The Indian has not yet been asked to learn such a strange doctrine as that personal character has anything to do with religion. His religion was always an affair of public ceremonial, imposing processions, bright dresses, music, and dancing. The brief rule of the cruel northern tribes added human sacrifices to the spectacle. The Spaniards came and put an end to these. The rest remained. The idols on the teocalli can scarcely have been ruder than the images in the church. There still is, as there always was, the greedy ecclesiastic. The Mexican country priest for the most part does not care, or if he cares does not know how, to teach his flock. In his life he is more often than not the worst example to them, zealous in nothing but his exactions and his vices. In his conversation, when you meet him socially, he reaches a vileness which only the southern tongues, and some of the oriental ones, have words to express. But his personal morality, or immorality, is a matter of indifference so far as his office is concerned. It is enough that he is the representative and delegate of a Power that has to be propitiated, the official and only channel through which certain supernatural and very desirable benefits are to be obtained.

The School of the free Republic is now beginning to do what the Church of the Vice-regal Colony neglected. And yet, if a fifteenth century Indian could revisit his native village at a fiesta, he would probably notice little difference in the proceedings.

In a country village, when the people have sown their corn, they will go to the priest and ask him how much he will charge to bring the big cross and the images out of the church and organise a procession with them round the fields. The priest asks perhaps $40. They offer him twenty; he refuses, and they go away. In a day or two they return with an amended offer, perhaps $25. He declines it, but reduces his terms to $35. After more days, and even weeks, of haggling, a bargain is struck, very likely at $28. Both parties are then perfectly satisfied, the people that they have screwed down the price, and the priest that he has got the last possible dollar; and the función is forthwith

arranged with zeal and good humour on both sides. Each man's place in the ceremony is assigned to him, and is proportioned to his social position and the amount of his subscription to the funds. Thus one rings the church bell while another walks in the procession. The sacred objects are dusted, wiped clean, and, if the bargain provides, even repainted. The people put on their clean-washed clothes, the fields are perambulated in solemn pomp, the proper genuflexions are made and the proper incantations recited, and the images are respectfully replaced in the church. The unseen Powers having been thus duly propitiated, and the best possible done to ensure a harvest, the day is concluded with music and dancing to celebrate the happy prognostication, much aguardiente is consumed, and the priest gets as drunk as anybody.

To the Catholic woman of all countries the Virgin stands in a peculiarly tender relationship. And it may well be that Mary is more to the Mexican woman of to-day than the Indian Mother Goddess was to her ancestress. The common Indian woman rises at three in the morning to grind the corn for the tortillas, toils all day till after sunset, and sleeps on her mat on the ground without a pillow. In a higher rank she does not work so hard, but she has little education, and her life is perhaps even duller. Her physical charms, all she possesses, have ripened early, and are past at five-and-twenty. Then her husband neglects her, her children are quickly independent of her care, and she takes to religion. She is not capable of devotion to an abstract idea. The capacity for that belongs to faculties more highly trained than hers. But the Church helps her with objects of adoration, visible and tangible, and the better woman she is the more surely will she become devota as she grows older. Her place in her children's affections, indeed, remains firm. The tie between mother and child, and especially between mother and son, is in Mexico peculiarly strong. It is independent of her fidelity to the father, or of other relations she may enter into. But the very closeness of that tie makes the strain on it anguish. become separated by distance and by death. hard to fill. But she wears over her heart the little picture of the Divine Mother who understands poor Ines's griefs. For La Santisima is not only an Indian Lady divinely powerful, but also an Indian mother, good and kind. She loves what the Indian loves, show and fine dresses and music and fireworks, and she has an Indian heart to feel for Indian pains.

Sons and mothers The long hours are

To an instructed worshipper here and there she is doubtless, if you ask, the Jewess who lived in a far eastern country, and never heard of Mexico. She is the same, and yet she is not the same. This is not an impossibility, it is only a mystery. The

Indian, like the white man, is so made that it is easier for him to believe by faith than on evidence. Our Lady of Guadalupe is to the Mexican the Most Blessed Virgin of the Catholic Church, the wife of Joseph, the Mother of God, the all-powerful intercessor with her Divine Son. And yet she is also his countrywoman, the ancient Goddess of his Nation, his Virgen Criolla, his own Native-Born Princess.

The 12th of December, the day of the Indian's third vision, and that on which he found the Virgin's picture on his mantle, has ever since been the fiesta of Our Lady. Miles Phillips, the captive English sailor, found it only a generation later already firmly established, and it is still observed in every village from Tehuantepec to the Rio Grande. I saw it last in the country town of Tehuacan de las Granadas. The shops were shut all day, and those pious people who could afford it had gone away to join the great pilgrimage to Guadalupe Hidalgo. In the evening I walked down the street on which most of the arrieros live, the carriers who drive the mule-trains by which much of the merchandise is still transported. Through open doors I could see into large court-yards, in which the mules were stabled and the pack-saddles lay in rows upon the ground.

The decorations were simple but effective. Along each side of the street a row of graceful reeds about ten feet high had been planted. Bright-tinted moss, and coloured flags of paper, purple, green, blue, yellow, and rainbow-hued, with many of the National colours (green, white, and red, for Union, Purity, and Independence), hung on lines stretched across the street, and fluttered in a gentle breeze. Almost every door had some arrangement of flags, coloured paper lanterns, gay cloth, or even a gaudy zarape hung up. The lamps were lit at sunset, and along the centre of the street tripods of cane had been placed, each bearing a thin adobe (sun-dried brick), or a shallow red earthenware cookingpan, on which blazed a pile of pitch-pine sticks. The pretty effect was heightened by the full moon that hung above.

The men, in clean-washed white cotton shirts and trousers, and silk sashes, immense bullion-laced hats, and their zarapes thrown over their shoulders (for the nights are cool in Tehuacan in December), crowded the middle of the street. The women sat in rows along the front of the houses and in the doorways. Here and there among them in the shadow I could see the pulsating glow of their cigarettes.

Men took off their hats, and some even knelt for a moment and crossed themselves, as they passed houses where in the dark interior there was a tiny altar, with Our Lady's picture, a copy

of the image at Guadalupe in its shell-like aureole, decked with flowers and lace, and having a little lamp or a thin candle burning before it.

No Mexican festival is complete without plenty of noise. Everybody was chattering and laughing, and there was a continuous fusillade of fireworks, rockets, wheels, sputtering coloured lights and crackers. Boys ran in and out among the crowd playing toro, the game of every Mexican and Spanish boy. One, with head down and closed fists held out, was the bull. Some were mounted on the backs of other boys, and carried long reeds for lances. These were the picadores. Others ran about enticing the bull with their scarlet zarapes, or, in default of zarapes, their jackets, held out in true torero style. All was stir, gaiety, and confusion. And to complete the fiesta a band of some forty performers (and good performers, too, for Mexico is nothing if not a musical country, and there is scarcely a mountain village without its little orchestra) stood in a circle, each music-stand with its little candle or lantern, each player with his big sombrero overshadowing his face, and his gaudy blanket flung over his shoulder in the manner of the Dissembling Villain of melodrama.

The conductor, all in black, his long cloak almost touching the ground, stood in the middle of the circle. He did not beat time; his band was too sympathetic to need that. He only gathered his forces with his eye, and raised his baton to give them a lead when the measure changed. One or two of the players improvised their parts very cleverly, like the performers in a Hungarian zigeuner band.

Next day on the railway I met processions of excursion trains bringing back the pilgrims from the shrine of Our Lady, the passengers overflowing the cars and clustering on platforms and steps. They looked contented. Their holiday was past and their money spent, but they had had a good time, had wiped the slate clean, and paid their vows anew at the altar of their gracious Patrón. And some, doubtless, had been healed by the waters of the Sacred Spring.

ANDREW MARSHALL.