NOTES
story as of an unnamed friar "whom God now holds in his glory," and assigns it to the year 1731. The motive of the story is found in Spain long before the oldest date assigned to it in Mexico. The wicked hero of Calderon's play, La devotion de la Cruz, is permitted to purge his sinful soul by confession after death. The Padre Lanza whose name has been tacked fast to the story—probably because his well-known charitable ministrations to the poor made him a likely person to yield to the old woman's importunities—was a real man who lived in the City of Mexico, greatly loved and respected, in the early years of the nineteenth century. Señor Roa Barcena fixes the decade 1820-1830 as the date of his strange adventure with a dead body in which was a living soul.
Aside from minor variants, two distinct versions of this legend are current. That which I have given in my text is the more popular. The other, less widely known, has for its scene an old house in the Calle de Olmedo—nearly a mile away from the Callejón del Padre Lecuona, and in a far more ancient quarter of the City. Concisely stated, the Calle de Olmedo version is to this effect:
Brother Mendo, a worthy and kind-hearted friar, is met of a dark night in the street by a man who begs him to come and hear a dying person confess. The friar wears the habit of his Order, and from his girdle hangs his rosary. He is led to a house near by; and finds within the house a very beautiful woman, richly clad in silks, whose arms are bound. That she is not in a dying state is obvious, and the friar asks for an explanation. For answer, the man tells him roughly: "This woman is about to die by violence. I must give
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