again,--the fires were lit, the bells rang out, the litanies were sung;--my feet were scorched to a cinder,--my muscles cracked, my blood and marrow hissed, my flesh consumed like shrinking leather,--the bones of my legs hung two black withering and moveless sticks in the ascending blaze;--it ascended, caught my hair,--I was crowned with fire,--my head was a ball of molten metal, my eyes flashed and melted in their sockets;--I opened my mouth, it drank fire,--I closed it, the fire was within,--and still the bells rung on, and the crowd shouted, and the king and queen, and all the nobility and priesthood, looked on, and we burned, and burned!--I was a cinder body and soul in my dream. (11) _Flames reversed_, intimating that the criminal is not to be burned. “I awoke from it with the horrible exclamation--ever shrieked, never heard--of those wretches, when the fires are climbing fast and fell,--_Misericordia por amor di Dios!_ My own screams awoke me,--I was in my prison, and beside me stood the tempter. With an impulse I could not resist,--an impulse borrowed from the horrors of my dream, I flung myself at his feet, and called on him to “save me.” “I know not, Sir, nor is it a problem to be solved by human intellect, whether this inscrutable being had not the power to influence my dreams, and dictate to a tempting demon the images which had driven me to fling myself at his feet for hope and safety. However it was, he certainly took advantage of my agony, half-visionary, half-real as it was, and, while proving to me that he had the power of effecting my escape from the Inquisition, proposed to me that incommunicable condition which I am forbid to reveal, except in the act of confession.” Here Melmoth could not forbear remembering the _incommunicable condition_ proposed to Stanton in the mad-house,--he shuddered, and was silent. The Spaniard went on.