Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 10.djvu/351

11 S. X. OCT. 31, 1914.1

NOTES AND QUERIES.

345

travelling in Spain, M. Rene Bazin was told of a curious ceremony which was formerly, and is sometimes still, performed in connexion with this festival in a remote part of the province of Leon. It is called "la functión del ramo," and the details as given to, and repeated by, the author of 'Terre d'Espagne' (pp. 134-7) are as follows, if a free and somewhat curtailed translation be accepted.

In the afternoon the curé, wearing a cope, and accompanied by the mayor and all the people, comes to the lord of the manor. They are preceded by a young man who carries a wand engarlanded with flowers, and by eight young girls carrying by two and two hoops encased in flowers and ribbons. The lord takes his place between the mayor and the cuée, and the procession goes towards the church. The young girls sing to a plaintive air a lay which opens thus:—

The church is closed; the procession stops; the young man who heads it declaims a piece of verse wherein he asserts that the people are come to pray for the dead, and that the blessed souls are watching for this moment. Let, then, the doors be thrown open.

They are opened, and the church is soon filled. The windows are hung with black, and all is dark save about a catafalque in the midst of the building, which is surrounded by yellow tapers, and wherein lie a human skull and some dry bones. Around this the girls and the young man stand with their hoops of flowers. One by one they recite verses describing the pains of souls who have not yet satisfied the justice of God; praying the pity of the living for them, and deploring our forgetfulness of our dearest ones after we cease to see them, and our general forgetfulness even of our own inevitable end.

Then, last of all, an orphan bends over the catafalque, takes the skull up in one hand, the bones in the other, and, raising them above her head, goes about the gloomy church singing somewhat as follows:—

She comes back to the catafalque, and sobs arise. She looks for a moment at the fleshless head which she is holding in her hands, raises it to her face, and kisses its white teeth: "Perhaps you were my father," says she, and she replaces it on the shroud.

But the fête does not end lugubriously. The dead have been prayed for, and next human joy regains its right. There is an al fresco dance, over which the curé, the mayor, and the landowner preside, and in the midst of a circle, formed by parishioners, the young people go through the figures of "le pas de cordon" and "la rose." Profane verses succeed to sacred, and words of love and laughter rise into the air of the great plain of Leon.

Why the ecclesiastical ceremony should be termed "la functión del ramo"=branch, I do not know, unless the wand be accepted as representing that.

—For the information of future historians of the world's press a note should be made that L'Indépendance Belge, driven successively from Brussels, Ghent, and Ostend by the German invasion, has made London the place of its publication. On Wednesday, the 21ˢᵗ inst., it first appeared with the imprint "Printed by the Victoria House Printing Co., Ltd., Tudor Street, Whitefriars, and published by the Proprietors at Tudor House, Tudor Street, Whitefriars."

The Pall Mall Gazette of the 23rd inst, states that the paper