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sufferings and the crucifixion of the child. Mary falls overwhelmed into the arms of her attendants, and Simeon exclaims, "Most blessed and most unfortunate among women! thy heart is to be pierced with Seven Sorrows, and this is the first." Demás rushes in and announces the massacre of the innocents, concluding with the appropriate reflection, "Perish the kings! always the murderers of the people." This sentiment is so much to the taste of the gamins of the paraíso that they vociferously demand an encore; but the Roman soldiers come in and commence the pleasing task of prodding the dolls in the arms of the chorus.
The next act is the Flight into Egypt. The curtain rises on a rocky ravine with a tinsel torrent in the background and a group of robbers on the stage. Gestas, the impenitent thief, stands sulky and glum in a corner, fingering his dagger as you might be sure he would, and informing himself in a growling soliloquy that his heart is consumed with envy and hate because he is not captain. The captain, one Issachar, comes in, a superbly handsome young fellow, named Mario, to my thinking the first comedian in Spain, dressed in a flashy suit of leopard hides, and announces
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the arrival of a stranger. Enters Demás, who says he hates the world and would fain drink its foul blood. He is made politely welcome. No! he will be captain or nothing. Issachar laughs scornfully and says he is in the way of that modest aspiration. But Demás speedily puts him out of the way with an Albacete knife, and becomes captain, to the profound disgust of the impenitent Gestas, who exclaims, just as the profane villains do nowadays on every well-conducted stage, "Damnation! foiled again!"
The robbers pick up their idolized leader and pitch him into the tinsel torrent. This is also extremely satisfactory to the wide-awake young Arabs of the cock-loft. The bandits disperse, and Demás indulges in some fifty lines of rhymed reflections, which are interrupted by the approach of the Holy Family, hotly pursued by the soldiery of Herod. They stop under a sycamore tree, which instantly, by very clever machinery, bends down its spreading branches and miraculously hides them from the bloodthirsty legionaries. These pass on, and Demás leads the saintly trio by a secret pass over the torrent,--the Mother and Child mounted upon an ass and St. Joseph trudging on behind
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with his lily-decked staff, looking all as if they were on a short leave of absence from Correggio's picture-frame.