passed under the roof of the Jew, but can find nothing,—nothing except a conviction of my utter insanity. It might not have been so,—I know not how it was. I remember his lighting me up a narrow stair, and my asking him, was he lighting me down the steps of the dungeons of the Inquisition?—his throwing open a door, and my asking him, was it the door of the torture-room?—his attempting to undress me, and my exclaiming, “Do not bind me too tight,—I know I must suffer, but be merciful;”—his throwing me on the bed, while I shrieked, “Well, you have bound me on the rack, then?—strain it hard, that I may forget myself the sooner; but let your surgeon not be near to watch my pulse,—let it cease to throb, and let me cease to suffer.” I remember no more for many days, though I have struggled to do so, and caught from time to time glimpses of thoughts better lost. Oh, Sir, there are some criminals of the imagination, whom if we could plunge into the oubliettes of its magnificent but lightly-based fabric, its lord would reign more happy. * * * * * * *

“Many days elapsed, indeed, before the Jew began to feel his immunity somewhat dearly purchased, by the additional maintenance of a troublesome, and, I fear, a deranged inmate. He took the first opportunity that the recovery of my intellect offered, of hinting this to me, and inquired mildly what I purposed to do, and where I meant to go. This question for the first time opened to my view that range of hopeless and interminable desolation that lay before me,—the Inquisition had laid waste the whole track of life, as with fire and sword. I had not a spot to stand on, a meal to earn, a hand to grasp, a voice to greet, a roof to crouch under, in the whole realm of Spain.

“You are not to learn, Sir, that the power of the Inquisition, like that of death, separates you, by its single touch, from all mortal relations. From the moment its grasp has seized you, all human hands unlock their hold of yours,—you have no longer father, mother, sister, or child. The most devoted and affectionate of all those relatives, who, in the natural intercourse of human life, would have laid their hands under your feet to procure you a smoother passage over its roughnesses, would be the first to grasp the faggot that was to reduce you to ashes, if the Inquisition were to demand the sacrifice. I knew all this; and I felt, besides, that, had I never been a prisoner in the Inquisition, I was an isolated being, rejected by father and mother,—the involuntary murderer of my brother, the only being on earth who loved me, or whom I could love or profit by,—that being who seemed to flash across my brief human existence, to illuminate and to blast. The 

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