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Updated: June 17, 2025
On these nights the pit is boarded over and joins the stage; the vast area of the whole theater forming a ball-room of magnificent proportions, which, brilliantly lighted, and crowded with thousands of gay maskers attired in every variety of colour and costume, forms a sight not easily forgotten. Ladies should not go except as spectators in a box and under the protection of their relatives.
Just as the maskers returned, the invalid, wrapped in a fine red Navajo blanket and bearing a basket of sacred meal, stepped upon the robe; he had before stood in front of the lodge by the side of the song-priest. The many spectators on foot and horseback clad in their rich blankets formed a brilliant surrounding for this ceremony, which took place just at the setting of the son.
They distinctly saw Marianna at the window, and heard Pasquale adjuring her, in the most honeyed terms, not to expose herself to the night air. The next evening there passed along the street towards the Porto del Popolo the strangest group of persons ever seen. They attracted all eyes, and people asked each other if some strange survival of the Carnival had preserved two or three mad maskers.
But I must relate one feat, the like of which I never saw in England before or since. There was a dance of the maskers, and in the midst of it her Majesty asked the Ambassador from Spayne if he had seen the latest French dance. He replied that he had not.
At length, the grotesque procession made its appearance in the thick of an immense uproar. The train comprised a chariot, escorted by men and women on horseback, clad in rich and elegant fancy dresses. Most of these maskers belonged to the middle and easy classes of society.
The gallery of the gymnasium was crowded with the friends and families of the maskers who were admitted by tickets, a limited number of which had been issued.
At the top of the Pont-aux-Choux, there was a stoppage. Nearly at the same moment, the other file, which was proceeding towards the Madeleine, halted also. At that point of the file there was a carriage-load of maskers. These carriages, or to speak more correctly, these wagon-loads of maskers are very familiar to Parisians.
And there were the Pink 'uns, too, easily identified, having all sorts of a good time with a pair of maskers resembling Doucette Landon and Peter Tappan; and there in powder, paint, and patch capered the Beekmans, Ellises, and Montrosses all the clans of the great and near-great of the country-side, gathering to join the eternal hunt for happiness where already the clarionets were sounding "Stole Away."
In these northern maskers we see kings, whose dress of bark and leaves along with the hut of green boughs and the fir-trees, under which they hold their court, proclaim them unmistakably as, like their Italian counterpart, Kings of the Wood.
According to this tale, the tyrant of Lough Ree conceived a passion for the fair daughter of Melaghlin, and demanded her of her father, who, fearing to refuse, affected to grant the infamous request, but despatched in her stead, to the place of assignation, twelve beardless youths, habited as maidens, to represent his daughter and her attendants; by these maskers the Norwegian and his boon companions were assassinated, after they had drank to excess and laid aside their arms and armour.
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