Thus mournfully closed the last chapter. These are sad words, fraught with anguish and despair, yet however sad, however despondent and hopeless, however much of grief, and anguish and despair they convey, they befell the Jews of Spain, and they fail altogether, when they are asked to describe the sufferings and miseries which met the unfortunate exiles, everywhere, in their fruitless search for a quiet spot where they might live or die in peace. Ships stood ready in the harbors to carry nearly all of the banished 300,000 Jews whithersoever it suited the captains best. Into these ships the exiles were literally packed, crowded together without regard to sex or age, often mother torn from child, husband from wife, brother from sister, friends from friends, and, separated on the coast meant separation forever. Words and the heart fail me to speak of the heart-rending cries of parent for child, and child for parent; of husband for wife and wife for husband; or of the wailing and lamenting, as Spain, the land of their birth, the home of their comfort and luxury and blessings, slowly faded out of sight and finally disappeared beneath the horizon. And now begins a chapter in the history of Israel's suffering so frightful, so revolting that the pen and tongue recoil from dwelling upon it in detail. Before these sufferings, all that had been hitherto endured, faded into insignificance. And again it is avarice, and rapacity that bring these miseries upon them. The possession of the gold brought on their former sufferings, and now it is the want of it that opens their present miseries. Thou miserable gold! Whether ally or whether foe, ever thou wast the cause of Israel's untold sufferings! Because of thee, they had to purchase life, and because of thee they had to suffer death! The expulsion edict had prohibited the Jews, under penalty of death, from having money in their possession at their departure. And the Jews obeyed the mandate. What cared they for money when they could not enjoy it in their beloved Spain? What cared they for enjoyment, or even for life, when it was to be lived in distant and hostile lands? But the pirate captains and their heartless crews felt convinced, that the Jews must have large sums of money sewed up in their clothes, or concealed on their persons. No sooner were they on high sea, when men and women and children were ordered on deck, commanded to disrobe publicly, regardless of innocence of youth and modesty of sex. Many a virgin and many a youth, many a husband and many a wife dared to resist, not that they had money concealed, but for shame sake, and the raging billows rocked them into their eternal sleep for their resistance. Disappointed in their search, their thirst for gold was the more excited. Body after body they ripped open, before the eyes of the unfortunate exiles, in the belief that they must have swallowed their gold and precious jewels. And disappointed