Then they proceeded in perfect silence to the market-place, where a car drawn by six horses, and covered by a black cloth baldeluir, which made it look just like a hearse, awaited them. The retiring sheriff had to sit down in this car, and the hundred electors walked alongside it on foot, as if they were accompanying a corpse on its last journey to the churchyard. And it was indeed, to the churchyard that the procession went, and all the streets were thickly strewn with straw, so that the rattling of the car might not be heard.
In front of the churchyard the representatives of the guilds, with the symbols of their trade on long poles, were drawn up in two lines: the butcher held his hatchet, the cobbler his last, the tailor his shears, the mason his trowel, the metal-smelter his mortar, the carpenter his ax, the joiner his plane. But the guild of the organ-builders was represented by the image of its patron St. Cecilia, fastened in a banner.
And all this time the town was as silent as the grave. No music, no noise of any kind was allowed.
The electors and the guildsmen marched into the very center of the churchyard, which was likewise covered with straw, and all stood around the chapel in a half-circle. Then the retiring sheriff arose in the car, which was laden with eighteen long, smoothly planed boards of the hardest wood, and said to the burgesses:
"Gentlemen and judges, let thy servant depart!" whereupon the curator answered in the name of the rest:
"Thou hast served us faithfully, depart in peace!"
Then the sheriff came down from the car.
"To whom am I to give these eighteen boards?" he asked.
"To the noble, valiant, worshipful burgher, Valentine Kalondai," replied the curator, in the name of the electors.
Then the car was turned round, and went back into the town as silently as it came, and this time, not only the hundred electors, but the representatives of the guilds also escorted it.