Nearer the altar are crowded together in pens a mass of women in black
dresses and black veils, who are determined to see and hear all,
treating the ceremony purely as a spectacle, and not as a religious
rite. Meantime the music soars, the organ groans, the censer clicks,
steams of incense float to and fro. The Pope and his attendants kneel
and rise,--he lifts the Host, and the world prostrates itself. A great
procession of dignitaries with torches bears a fragment of the original
cradle of the Holy Bambino from its chapel to the high altar, through
the swaying crowd that gape and gaze and stare and sneer and adore. And
thus the evening passes. When the clock strikes midnight all the bells
ring merrily, Mass commences at the principal churches, and at San Luigi
dei Francesi and the Gesu there is a great illumination (what the French
call _un joli spectacle_) and very good music. Thus Christmas is ushered
in at Rome.
The next day is a great _festa_. All classes are dressed in their best
and go to Mass,--and when that is over, they throng the streets to chat
and lounge and laugh and look at each other. The Corso is so crowded in
the morning, that a carriage can scarcely pass.
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