It was an exhausting process, and the Inquisitors, like the royal patron of their institution, well knew that time was a powerful ally.  Still they resolved to call in a new one to their aid.  M——­ was known to be very fond of his family; and long experience had taught the reverend fathers that even the manliest heart may be shaken by a sudden awakening of tender emotions.  The examinations were discontinued.  For three days M——­ was left to the solitude of his cell,—­a solitude deeper and more unnerving from contrast with the mental tension of the last fortnight.  Then, at the usual hour of examination, the door opened.  The usual attendants were in waiting.  “Now for a new trial of wits,” thought he, as he rose to follow them.  Then it occurred to him that it might be for sentence that he was summoned; and while he was weighing the probabilities, and calling up his strength for the occasion, he reached the door, the attendants threw it open, and he found himself in the presence, not of his judges, but of his wife and children.  Pale, bewildered, looking timidly towards him, through eyes dim with tears, there they stood, utterly at a loss what to say or what to do.

He felt his heart bound.  But he saw the snare, and, repressing his emotions by a powerful effort, held out his hand instead of opening his arms, and bidding them, cheer up and give themselves no uneasiness about him, and above all not to let their enemies fancy that either he or they would be cast down by anything that they could do, he calmly turned to the guards, and told them, that, if that stale trick was all they had brought him there for, they had better take him back to his cell.

Meanwhile his friends were not idle:  and he had friends, as I have already hinted, even in the sacred college.  With a cardinal on your side, you may do many things in Rome which it would hardly answer to venture upon without him; for who can tell but that that Cardinal may one day be Pope?  The precise nature of the accusation lodged against him M——­ never knew; but he had gathered enough from the interrogatories to feel that he had got lightly off, when he found himself condemned to say his prayers and read books of devotion three months in a convent, with the privilege of walking in the garden and talking theology with the elder brethren.

And thus the old man whom Bunyan’s English Pilgrim saw in the cave by the way-side two hundred years ago still sits there, biting his nails and grinning, not altogether impotently, at Roman Pilgrims, to this very day.

The Congregation of the Holy Office is composed of thirteen cardinals, one of whom is secretary, and an assessor, a commissary, counsellors, and several officers taken from the prelates and regular orders.  The Pope himself is Prefect.  The counsellors meet on Mondays in the Palace of the Inquisition; the whole body on Wednesdays in the Convent of the Minerva,—­where St. Dominic still smiles upon his faithful followers,—­and Thursdays before the Pope.  The examination of their records and the opening of their prisons, during the brief existence of the “Roman Republic” of 1849, showed that these meetings were not always mere matters of form.