Señor Obregón gives what is known of the bell's history in Mexico. It was of "medium size"; the hanger in the shape of an imperial crown supported by two lions; on one side, in relief, the two-headed eagle holding in its talons the arms of Austria; on the other side a Calvario--Christ, St. John, the Virgin; near the lip, the words "Salve Regina," and the legend: "Maese Rodrigo me fecit 1530." From the unknown time of its arrival in Mexico until the last quarter of the eighteenth century it reposed idly in one of the corridors of the Palace. There it was found by the Viceroy (1789-1794) the Conde de Revillagigedo; and by that very energetic personage, to whom idleness of any sort was abhorrent, promptly was set to work. In accordance with his orders, it was hung in a bell-gable, over the central doorway of the Palace, directly above the clock; and in that position it remained, very honestly doing its duty as a clock-bell, for more than seventy years. During the period of the French intervention, in December, 1867, a new bell was installed in place of it and orders were given that it should be melted down--possibly, though Señor Obregón gives no information on this point, to be recast into cannon, along with the many church bells that went that way in Mexico at about that time. Whatever may have been planned in regard to its transmutation did not come off--because the liquid metal became refractory and could not be recast. As this curious statement of fact has an exceptional interest in the case of a bell with so bad a record, I repeat it in Señor Obregón's own words: "_Entonces se mandó fundirla; mas al verificarlo se descompuso el metal!_"
By a natural confusion of the name of the street in which the dead man was confessed with the name of the priest who heard his confession, this legend frequently is told nowadays as relating not to Padre Lanza but to Padre Lecuona. An old man whom I met in the Callejón del Padre Lecuona, when I was making search for the scene of the confession, told me the story in that way--and pointed out the house to me in all sincerity. Following that telling, I so mixed the matter myself in my first publication of the legend. Who Padre Lecuona was, or why the street was named after him, I have not discovered. Probably still another legend lurks there. Señor Riva Palacio tells the 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 devocion 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 Bárcena fixes the decade 1820-1830 as the date of his strange adventure with a dead body in which was a living soul.