as before, and tightened the cords on his right leg the second time; but still he maintained that he had never spoken such a thing; and in answer to the questions of his tormentors, constantly reiterated that he had never spoken those words.  Moriz then pronounced that the said torture should be regarded as begun, but not finished; and De Salas was released, to live, if he could survive, in the incessant apprehension that if he gave the slightest umbrage to a familiar, he would be carried again into the same chamber, and be racked in every limb.”

Llorente also relates, from the original records, another case quite as cruel and unjust as the above.  “On the 8th day of December, 1528, one Catalina, a woman of bad character, informed the inquisitors that, eighteen years before she had lived in the house with a Morisco named Juan, by trade a coppersmith, and a native of Segovia; that she had observed that neither he nor his children ate pork or drank wine, and that, on Saturday nights and Sunday mornings they used to wash their feet, which custom, as well as abstinence from pork and wine, was peculiar to the Moors.  The old man was at that time an inhabitant of Benevente, and seventy-one years of age.  But the inquisitors at once summoned him into their presence, and questioned him at three several interviews.  All that he could tell was, that he received baptism when he was forty-five years of age; that having never eaten pork or drunk wine, he had no taste for them; and that, being coppersmiths, they found it necessary to wash themselves thoroughly once a week.  After some other examinations, they sent him back to Benevente, with prohibition to go beyond three leagues’ distance from the town.  Two years afterwards the inquisitor determined that he should be threatened with torture, in order to obtain information that might help them to criminate others.  He was accordingly taken to Valladolid, and in a subterranean chamber, called the ’chamber, or dungeon, of torment,’ stripped naked, and bound to the ‘ladder.’  This might well have extorted something like confession from an old man of seventy-one; but he told them that whatever he might say when under torture would be merely extorted by the extreme anguish, and therefore unworthy of belief; that he would not, through fear of pain, confess what had never taken place.  They kept him in close prison until the next Auto de Fe, when he walked among the penitents, with a lighted candle in his hand, and, after seeing others burnt to death, paid the holy office a fee of four ducats, and went home, not acquitted, but released.  He was not summoned again, as he died soon afterwards.”

It sometimes happened that an individual was arrested by mistake, and a person who was entirely innocent was tortured instead of the real or supposed criminal.  A case of this kind Mr. Bower found related at length in the “Annals of the Inquisition at Macerata.”