It was only by the most stringent caution that existence could be maintained under these conditions. Gaspar de Campos, one of the Pastrana group, gives, in his confession, some account of the devices adopted for concealment. On the Sabbath the mother and girls would sit with reels or spinning wheels before them and, if any one came in, would pretend to be at work. On fast days the servant-girl would be sent out on an errand; during her absence food would be taken out of the olla and plates and spoons would be greased, they would then go to the house of a neighbor Jewess and, when the servant followed them, she would be sent back to get her dinner, telling her that they had dined, and then the neighbor would do the same. Even in the closest family circle the utmost reserve was often practised. Children were not allowed to know anything of Judaism until of an age at which their discretion could be trusted. Parents, indeed, frequently brought up their children as Catholics, and left it to others to convert them fortuitously. Pedro Núñez Marques, tried in Madrid in 1679, testified that he had been inducted into Judaism in Villaflor (Portugal) by María Pinto, wife of Alvaro de Morales. After he returned to his father's house, in Torre de Moncorvo, he hesitated for months to let his parents know of his conversion, At last, in 1653, he told his mother, when she approved of it and said that both she and his father, Francisco Núñez Ramos, were Jews. There were eight children of them; he knew them all to be Jews but could give no details, except as to three sisters: they all assumed each other to be so, but each one attended to his own affairs, to earn a living, and to live with the utmost precaution. As his sister Angela Núñez Marques expressed it, they all knew each other to be Portuguese; that was sufficient, and further confidences were superfluous.[818]