the night in the prison, which serves them as a comfortable lodging-house, free of rent. The Instructions require that the alcaide shall see that they perform their penance, but this has become impossible, and there are no means of restricting their intercourse with the faithful. As for their plea that they leave the secret prison broken in health and stripped of their property, that they have no chance to learn trades and must support their families by trading, the answer is that only through the mercy of the Holy Office do they escape burning, and they should be thankful that their lives are spared; their poverty is a trifling penalty for their crimes, and their children only share the punishment of paternal heresy.[434] [Sidenote: _THE PENITENTIAL PRISON_] With all this laxity, there was a pretence of maintaining the old rigor, which regarded prison-breaking as relapse, but the real offence lay in the fugitive throwing off the sanbenito. There seems to have been little desire to recapture those who absented themselves, for the formula of the mandate to search for and arrest fugitives only concerns itself with those who escape from the secret prison and who thus are still on trial,[435] but when from any cause penitents were returned to the tribunal, their treatment is exemplified in the case of Juan González, who escaped from the _casa de la peniténcia_ of Valladolid, July 3, 1645. His story was that, having gone out to collect some money due to him, he gambled it away, got drunk, went to sleep under the walls of the Carmelite convent in the suburbs and, on awaking next morning and fearing punishment, he wandered away, throwing off the sanbenito and seeking work. Thus he reached Irun and designed passing into France, but was recognized by a priest who had seen him in Valladolid; he was handed over to the commissioner and was passed from familiar to familiar till he was lodged in the secret prison of Valladolid. The fiscal claimed that his flight and throwing off the sanbenito proved him to be an impenitent and pertinacious relapsed into Judaism who must be relaxed; but his sentence was only two hundred lashes and irremissible prison.[436]