host, and watching him in turn with red wolfish eyes, which glanced from his board to his person, as if I could, at a moment’s hint of danger from _his_ treachery, have changed my meal, and feasted on his life-blood. No such danger occurred,--my host was more afraid of me than I had reason to be of him, and for many causes. He was a Jew _innate_, an impostor,--a wretch, who, drawing sustenance from the bosom of our holy mother the church, had turned her nutriment to poison, and attempted to infuse that poison into the lips of his son. I was but a fugitive from the Inquisition,--a prisoner, who had a kind of instinctive and very venial dislike to giving the Inquisitors the trouble of lighting the faggots for _me_, which would be much better employed in consuming the adherent to the law of Moses. In fact, impartiality considered, there was every thing in my favour, and the Jew just acted as if he felt so,--but all this I ascribed to his terrors of the Inquisition. “That night I slept,--I know not how or where. I had wild dreams before I slept, if I did sleep; and after,--such visions,--such _things_, passed in dread and stern reality before me. I have often in my memory searched for the traces of the first night I passed under the roof of the Jew, but can find nothing,--nothing except a conviction of my utter insanity. It might not have been so,--I know not how it was. I remember his lighting me up a narrow stair, and my asking him, was he lighting me _down_ the steps of the dungeons of the Inquisition?--his throwing open a door, and my asking him, was it the door of the torture-room?--his attempting to undress me, and my exclaiming, “Do not bind me too tight,--I know I must suffer, but be merciful;”--his throwing me on the bed, while I shrieked, “Well, you have bound me on the rack, then?--strain it hard, that I may forget myself the sooner; but let your surgeon not be near to watch my pulse,--let it cease to throb, and let me cease to suffer.” I remember no more for many days, though I have struggled to do so, and caught from time to time glimpses of thoughts better lost. Oh, Sir, there are some _criminals of the imagination_, whom if we could plunge into the _oubliettes_ of its magnificent but lightly-based fabric, its lord would reign more happy. * * * * * * * “Many days elapsed, indeed, before the Jew began to feel his immunity somewhat dearly purchased, by the additional maintenance of a troublesome, and, I fear, a deranged inmate. He took the first opportunity that the recovery of my intellect offered, of hinting this to me, and inquired mildly what I purposed to do, and where I meant to go. This question for the first time opened to my view that range of hopeless and interminable desolation that lay before me,--the Inquisition had laid waste the whole track of life, as with fire and sword. I had not a spot to stand on, a meal to earn, a hand to grasp, a voice to greet, a roof to crouch under, in the whole realm of Spain.