Already the point of Constitution-making—­the crystallization-point of republics—­had been reached.  The ports of Venezuela were for the first time opened to foreign trade.  Her inhabitants were no longer restricted from the enjoyment of the fruits of their own industry.  A gigantic system of taxation had been brushed, like a spider’s web, away.  Two-thirds of the Captain-Generalcy, in a word, were free.

There was little fear among any of the inhabitants of Caracas, in March, 1812, that they would again fall under the dominion of Spain.  The Carnival had been celebrated with greater joyousness than in any year before; the proverbial gayety of the town was doubled during the concluding festival of Shrove Tuesday; and Lent had scarcely thrown as deep a shade as usual over the devoutest inhabitants of the city.  Lent drew to a close, and there was every prospect that Passion Week would be succeeded by a season of rejoicing over impending defeats of the Royalist Goths in Coro and Guiana; and Passion Week came.  Holy Thursday fell on the 26th of March.

The solemn festival was ushered in with the most imposing rites of the Church.  In the great cathedral, which dwarfed all other buildings in the Plaza, there was high mass that day.  The famous bell clanged out to all Caracas remembrance of the agony of our Lord.  A silent multitude was prostrated all day long before the gorgeous altar.  Prelates and priests and acolytes stood, splendid in vestments of purple and white and gold, solemnly celebrating upon the steps of the sanctuary the holiest mysteries of the Roman Catholic communion.  Above and around, gigantic tapers flared from candlesticks of beaten gold; and every little while, the glorious anthems floated forth in majestic cadence, eddying in waves of harmony about the colonnade that stretched in dusky perspective from the great door to the altar, soaring above the distant arches, and swelling upwards in floods of melody, until the vast concavity of the vaulted nave was filled with a sea of sound.  But a sultry heaviness weighed with the incense upon the air.  Elder citizens glanced uneasily at one another, and the thoughts of many wandered anxiously from the sacred building.  Outside, the streets were empty.  All Caracas was engaged in public worship; and the white dwellings that inclosed the Plaza, with its converging avenues, looked silently down upon deserted pavements, echoing only now and then to the careless tread of a party of negroes, or to the clattering heel of some undevout trooper.  The sun had a glow as of molten copper; the atmosphere was dense; but not a cloud occupied the heavens.  Towards evening the churches and the cathedral were again emptied, and the throng of worshippers, streaming out into the streets, prepared to witness the great religious procession that was to close the ceremonies of the holy day.  Still the declining sun glowed with unnatural intensity of hue; and the evening breeze swept over the town in unusually fitful and stormy gusts.  The air seemed to be laden with mysterious melancholy, to sigh with a hidden presage of some awful calamity to come.