As the fiddles invariably play their parts in funerals as
well as on festive processions, it requires some familiarity with the
customs of the country to distinguish one from the other. The music
to-night is much better than the ordinary baile music. A native
harpist adds the music of his many strings; and not bad music either,
though he does not know a quaver from a semibreve, and his harp is of
his own manufacture. The sameness, however, caused by playing always
and everything in the same key is perceptible. But dancing critics are
not disposed to be very severe.
The enjoyment of the evening is at high pressure. The dancers are
swinging, surging, spinning through the Spanish dance. Everybody who
can find a partner and a place on the floor--there are many who cannot
find the latter--is dancing. It is a gay, a brilliant scene. All is
going as merrily as a whole chime of marriage-bells when a deep and
solemn peal from the church close by breaks in over the music, the
laughter and the dancing. It is midnight! It is the _Noche Buena_,
and the bell summons the faithful to the midnight mass. The effect is
electric. The last twirl of the waltz is suspended, half executed. The
dancers stop as suddenly as if they were puppets moved and stilled by
the cunning of some wire-pulling hand. A general rush is made for the
church: in a moment the ball-room is empty. The church is filled as
instantaneously, and the wildly gay dancers of a moment ago are now
kneeling, hushed and down-bent, in devotional attitudes.
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