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SEVILLE 31
The dance was given in the cathedral itself. For one
entire week we saw ten boys dance before the high
altar each evening in laudation of the Immaculate Con-
ception. They were dressed in the costumes of pages
of the Seventeenth Century and they sang and clicked
their castanets as an accompaniment. It was so lovely
that it was easy to understand how dance-loving Seville
is so strongly attached to the unique church festival of
Los Seises, which no other church in Catholic Christen-
dom has permission to celebrate, and which several
popes have tried in vain to stop.
Your merry Sevillano regards only one thing as
sacred, and that thing is pleasure. Whatever subdues
pleasure provokes his derision. What piety he has
in his own spirit inspires him with blasphemous aspira-
tions, which grow as his fear of God increases. No-
where in irreverent Andalusia is there so natural and
easy a union of the fear of God and contempt for Him
in the same person as there is in Seville.
During our stay we lived at the house of two elderly
ladies, sisters, and very poor. At every step we took
they commended us to the protection of a saint. One
day they besought us to go first to the cathedral be-
fore taking our day’s trip, to pray the favor of the
Madonna of Kings, patroness of excursions. ‘This
Madonna could perform great miracles. Indeed, a
priest had once lifted her robe to see what she was
made of and the Madonna had stricken him blind on
the spot. ‘You see, she was only of wood,” they ex-
plained, and laughed.
It was Seville that hit upon the idea that the con-
fiscated Capuchin monastery would be devoted to the
purpose least foreign to its original destination if it
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