voting, to prepare reports upon the cases.  Nothing could be more summary.  Information was lodged against a man, or against a hundred men, in one document.  The Duke sent the papers to the council, and the inferior councillors reported at once to Vargas.  If the report concluded with a recommendation of death to the man, or the hundred men in question, Vargas instantly approved it, and execution was done upon the man, or the hundred men, within forty-eight hours.  If the report had any other conclusion, it was immediately sent back for revision, and the reporters were overwhelmed with reproaches by the President.

Such being the method of operation, it may be supposed that the councillors were not allowed to slacken in their terrible industry.  The register of every city, village, and hamlet throughout the Netherlands showed the daily lists of men, women, and children thus sacrificed at the shrine of the demon who had obtained the mastery over this unhappy land.  It was not often that an individual was of sufficient importance to be tried—­if trial it could be called—­by himself.  It was found more expeditious to send them in batches to the furnace.  Thus, for example, on the 4th of January, eighty-four inhabitants of Valenciennes were condemned; on another day, ninety-five miscellaneous individuals, from different places in Flanders; on another, forty-six inhabitants of Malines; on another, thirty-five persons from different localities, and so on.

The evening of Shrovetide, a favorite holiday in the Netherlands, afforded an occasion for arresting and carrying off a vast number of doomed individuals at a single swoop.  It was correctly supposed that the burghers, filled with wine and wassail, to which perhaps the persecution under which they lived lent an additional and horrible stimulus, might be easily taken from their beds in great numbers, and be delivered over at once to the council.  The plot was ingenious, the net was spread accordingly.  Many of the doomed were, however, luckily warned of the terrible termination which was impending over their festival, and bestowed themselves in safety for a season.  A prize of about five hundred prisoners was all which rewarded the sagacity of the enterprise.  It is needless to add that they were all immediately executed.  It is a wearisome and odious task to ransack the mouldy records of three centuries ago, in order to reproduce the obscure names of the thousands who were thus sacrificed..  The dead have buried their dead, and are forgotten.  It is likewise hardly necessary to state that the proceedings before the council were all ‘ex parte’, and that an information was almost inevitably followed by a death-warrant.  It sometimes happened even that the zeal of the councillors outstripped the industry of the commissioners.  The sentences were occasionally in advance of the docket.  Thus upon one occasion a man’s case was called for trial, but before the investigation was commenced it was discovered that he had been already executed.  A cursory examination of the papers proved, moreover, as usual, that the culprit had committed no crime.  “No matter for that,” said Vargas, jocosely, “if he has died innocent, it will be all the better for him when he takes his trial in the other world.”