While these _Gentlemen Hidalgos_ are employed in such ungentle services, though the law allows them the exemptions of their class, public opinion confines them to their natural level. The only chance for any of these disguised _noblemen_ to be publicly treated with due honour and deference is, unfortunately, one for which they feel an unconquerable aversion--that of being delivered into the rude hands of a Spanish _Jack Ketch_. We had here, two years ago, an instance of this, which I shall relate, as being highly characteristic of our national prejudices about blood. A gang of five banditti was taken within the jurisdiction of this _Audiencia_, or chief court of justice, one of whom, though born and brought up among the lowest ranks of society, was, by family, an _Hidalgo_, and had some relations among the better class of gentlemen. I believe the name of the unfortunate man was _Herrera_, and that he was a native of a town about thirty English miles from Seville, called _el Arahal_. But I have not, at present, the means of ascertaining the accuracy of these particulars. After lingering, as usual, four or five years in prison, these unfortunate men were found guilty of several murders and highway robberies, and sentenced to suffer death. The relations of the _Hidalgo_, who, foreseeing this fatal event, had been watching the progress of the trial, in order to step forward just in time to avert the stain which a cousin, in the second or third remove, would cast upon their family, if he died in mid-air like a villain; presented a petition to the judges, accompanied with the requisite documents, claiming for their relative the honours of his rank, and engaging to pay the expenses attending the execution of a _nobleman_. The petition being granted as a matter of course, the following scene took place. At a short distance from the gallows on which the four _simple_ robbers were to be hanged in a cluster, from the central point of the cross beam, all dressed in white shrouds, with their hands tied before them, that the hangman, who actually rides upon the shoulders of the criminal, may place his foot as in a stirrup,[7]--was raised a scaffold about ten feet high, on an area of about fifteen by twenty, the whole of which and down to the ground, on all sides, was covered with black baize. In the centre of the scaffold was erected a sort of arm-chair, with a stake for its back, against which, by means of an iron collar attached to a screw, the neck is crushed by one turn of the handle. This machine is called _Garrote_--“a stick”--from the old-fashioned method of strangling, by twisting the fatal cord with a stick. Two flights of steps on opposite sides of the stage, afforded a separate access, one for the criminal and the priest, the other for the executioner and his attendant. [7] The Cortes have abolished this barbarous method of inflicting death.