chief inquisitor at Goa, which procured an order for his arrest.  Like all other persons whom it pleased the inquisitors or their servants to arrest, in any part of the Portuguese dominions beyond the Cape of Good Hope, he was thrown into prison with a promiscuous crowd of delinquents, the place and treatment being of the worst kind, even according to the colonial barbarism of the seventeenth century.  To describe his sufferings there, is not to our purpose, inasmuch as all prisoners fared alike, many of them perishing from starvation and disease.  Many offenders against the Inquisition were there at the same time,—­some accused of Judaism, others, of Paganism—­in which sorcery and witchcraft were included—­and others of immorality.  In a field so wide and so fruitful, the “scrutators” of the faith could not fail to gather abundantly.  After an incarceration of at least four months, he and his fellow-sufferers were shipped off for the ecclesiastical metropolis of India, all of them being in irons.  The vessel put into Bacaim, and the prisoners were transferred, for some days, to the prison of that town, where a large number of persons were kept in custody, under charge of the commissary of the holy office, until a vessel should arrive to carry them to Goa.

“In due time they were again at sea, and a fair wind wafted their fleet into that port after a voyage of seven days.  Until they could be deposited in the cells of the Inquisition with the accustomed formalities, the Archbishop of Goa threw open his prison for their reception, which prison, being ecclesiastical, may be deemed worthy of description.

“The most filthy,” says Dellon, “the most dark, and the most horrible that I ever saw; and I doubt whether a more shocking and horrible prison can be found anywhere.  It is a kind of cave wherein there is no day seen but by a very little hole; the most subtle rays of the sun cannot enter into it, and there is never any true light in it.  The stench is extreme. * * *

“On the 16th of January 1674, at eight o’clock in the morning, an officer came with orders to take the prisoners to “the holy house.”  With considerable difficulty M. Dellon dragged his iron-loaded limbs thither.  They helped him to ascend the stairs at the great entrance, and in the hall, smiths were waiting to take off the irons from all the prisoners.  One by one, they were summoned to audience.  Dellon, who was called the first, crossed the hall, passed through an ante-chamber, and entered a room, called by the Portuguese “board of the holy office,” where the grand inquisitor of the Indies sat at one end of a very large table, on an elevated floor in the middle of the chamber.  He was a secular priest about forty years of age, in full vigor—­a man who could do his work with energy.  At one end of the room was a large crucifix, reaching from the floor almost to the ceiling, and near it, sat a notary on a folding stool.  At the opposite end, and near the inquisitor, Dellon