"When I recovered my senses, I found myself stretched on the floor of my dungeon, my hands and feet secured with heavy fetters and manacles, fastened by a thick chain, the nails of which my tormentors were still riveting! Left by those wretches stretched in the same place, I could have wished that the doors, which closed after them, should never again open. Eternal sleep was all I desired, and all I asked of Heaven. It was after much difficulty that I dragged myself to my bed. It seemed to me that the noise of my chains would awaken the vigilance of my jailers, whose presence was to me the most fatal of my torments. I spent the whole of the night struggling with the intense pains which were the effects of the torture, and with the workings of my excited mind, which offered but a horrible perspective to my complicated misfortunes. This state of mental agitation, and the burning fever which was every moment increasing, soon threw me into a delirium, during which I scarcely noticed the operation performed by my jailers, of opening the seams of my coat to examine the state of my arm." Having undergone innumerable sufferings, his enemies being bent on his destruction, Van Halen at length succeeded, on the 30th of January, 1818, in making his escape from the prisons of the Inquisition; upon which he repaired successively to France, England, and Russia, returning to Spain in 1821. Llorente again, records the following fact, which he says was given by one who was present when the Inquisition was thrown open in 1820, by orders of the Cortes of Madrid. Twenty-one prisoners were found in it, not one of whom knew the name of the city in which he was; some had been confined three years, some a longer period, and not one knew perfectly the nature of the crime of which he was accused. One of these prisoners had been condemned, and was to have suffered on the following day. His punishment was to be death by the pendulum. The method of thus destroying the victim is as follows:—The condemned is fastened in a groove upon a table, on his back; suspended above him is a pendulum, the edge of which is sharp, and it is so constructed as to become longer with every movement. The wretch sees this implement of destruction swinging to and fro above him, and every moment the keen edge approaching nearer and nearer: at length it cuts the skin of his nose, and gradually cuts on, until life is extinct. It may be doubted if the Holy Office, in its mercy, ever invented a more humane and rapid method of exterminating heresy, or ensuring confiscation! This, let it be remembered, was a punishment of the secret tribunal, A. D., 1820!!