“In prostrate and tremulous agony, the father held up his locked hands to his child. I seized the moment--despair had made me reckless. I understood not a word of what was said, except the reference to the Inquisition. I seized on that last word--I grasped, in my despair, at the heart of father and child. I rushed from behind the curtain, and exclaiming, “If he does not betray you to the Inquisition, _I will_.” I fell at his feet. This mixture of defiance and prostration, my squalid figure, my inquisitorial habit, and my bursting on this secret and solemn interview, struck the Jew with a horror he vainly gasped to express, till, rising from my knees, on which I had fallen from my weakness, I added, “Yes, I will betray you to the Inquisition, unless you instantly promise to shelter me from it.” The Jew glanced at my dress, perceived his danger and mine, and, with a _physical_ presence of mind unparalleled, except in a man under strong impressions of mental excitation and personal danger, bustled about to remove every trace of the expiatory sacrifice, and of my inquisitorial costume, in a moment. In the same breath he called aloud for _Rebekah_, to remove the vessels from the table; bid _Antonio_ quit the apartment, and hastened to clothe me in some dress that he had snatched from a wardrobe collected from centuries; while he tore off my inquisitorial dress with a violence that left me actually naked, and the habit in rags. “There was something at once fearful and ludicrous in the scene that followed. Rebekah, an old Jewish woman, came at his call; but, seeing a third person, retreated in terror, while her master, in his confusion, called her in vain by her _Christian_ name of Maria. Obliged to remove the table alone, he overthrew it, and broke the leg of the unfortunate animal fastened to it, who, not to be without his share in the tumult, uttered the most shrill and intolerable screams, while the Jew, snatching up the sacrificial knife, repeated eagerly, “Statim mactat gallum,” and put the wretched bird out of its pain; then, trembling at this open avowal of his Judaism, he sat down amid the ruins of the overthrown table, the fragments of the broken vessels, and the remains of the martyred cock. He gazed at me with a look of stupified and ludicrous inanity, and demanded in delirious tones, what “my lords the Inquisitors had pleased to visit his humble but highly-honoured mansion for?” I was scarce less deranged than he was; and, though we both spoke the same language, and were forced by circumstances into the same strange and desperate confidence with each other, we really needed, for the first half-hour, a rational interpreter of our exclamations, starts of fear, and bursts of disclosure. At last our mutual terror acted honestly between us, and we understood each other. The end of the matter was, that, in less than an hour, I felt myself clad in a comfortable garment, seated at a table amply spread, watched over by my involuntary