heads of accusation condensed from the first delation and the deposition of the witnesses. If needful at this point, he was put to the torture, again and yet again.[84] He never heard the names of his accusers, nor was he furnished with a full bill of the charges against him in writing. At this stage he was usually remanded, and the judicial proceedings were deliberately lengthened out with a view of crushing his spirit and bringing him to abject submission. For his defence he might select one advocate, but only from a list furnished by his judges; and this advocate in no case saw the original documents of the impeachment. It rarely happened, upon this one-sided method of trial, that an accused person was acquitted altogether. If he escaped burning or perpetual incarceration, he was almost certainly exposed to the public ceremony of penitence, with its attendant infamy, fines, civil disabilities, and future discipline. Sentence was not passed upon condemned persons until they appeared, dressed up in a San Benito, at the place of punishment. This costume was a sort of sack, travestying a monk's frock, made of coarse yellow stuff, and worked over with crosses, flames, and devils, in glaring red. It differed in details according to the destination of the victim: for some ornaments symbolized eternal hell, and others the milder fires of purgatory. If sufficiently versed in the infernal heraldry of the Holy Office, a condemned man might read his doom before he reached the platform of the _auto_. There he heard whether he was sentenced to relaxation--in other words, to burning at the hands of the hangman--or to reconciliation by means of penitence. At the last moment, he might by confession _in extremis_ obtain the commutation of a death sentence into life-imprisonment, or receive the favor of being strangled before he was burned. A relapsed heretic, however--that is, one who after being reconciled had once again apostatized, was never exempted from the penalty of burning. To make these holocausts of human beings more ghastly, the pageant was enhanced by processions of exhumed corpses and heretics in effigy. Artificial dolls and decomposed bodies, with grinning lips and mouldy foreheads, were hauled to the huge bonfire, side by side with living men, women, and children. All of them alike--_fantoccini_, skeletons, and quick folk--were enveloped in the same grotesquely ghastly San Benito, with the same hideous yellow miters on their pasteboard, worm-eaten, or palpitating foreheads. The procession presented an ingeniously picturesque discord of ugly shapes, an artistically loathsome dissonance of red and yellow hues, as it defiled, to the infernal music of growled psalms and screams and moanings, beneath the torrid blaze of Spanish sunlight. [Footnote 84: The Supreme Council forbade the repetition of torture; but this hypocritical law was evaded in practice by declaring that the torture had been suspended. Llorente, vol. i. p. 307.]