[let to some one], explaining to the people who lived in that house that his suspicion induced him to ask their permission to make a hole with a gimlet, in order to see whether his wardrobe had been put up where he guessed it must be; and that he had obtained consent to this request, because the lodgers in that second apartment had conceived some curiosity to know who the persons might be who met there only at night time; that therefore he betook himself to that dwelling on the night of the fourth of May, having previously made a hole, and stopped there till the first-floor apartment was opened, and he saw that after midnight a hall was lighted up which was hung with mourning and furnished with a throne covered with blue cloth and with other symbols of death, and here and there were disposed small lanterns, and persons also sitting here and there, dressed in black robes; so that at this horrid sight he was terrified, and he heard him who sat on the throne say these very words: ‘Brethren, let us suspend our meeting, for we are watched’; and in that room he saw indeed his wardrobe placed against a balcony. And that he left the lodgers in that second apartment in consternation, and he himself, full of amazement and terror, and still surprised by the novelty of the things, and supposing, in his simplicity, that witchcraft was practised there and the works of the devil, he was scandalised, and went to the parish priest of San Simon Grande, his confessor, and that having told him all he had seen, heard, and observed, he (the priest) advised him to quickly lay before the government all that he had chanced to see and hear. The good man did so, and told all to the Secretary of the Inquisitors of State. A warrant was therefore issued on that same morning of the sixth of May by the Supreme Tribunal to its own officer Cristofoli, to go thither (to Riomarin), accompanied by the Capitan Grande and twenty-four men. Having entered that apartment, where he surprised a nobleman who guarded the place, he (Cristofoli) discovered a lodge of freemasons. Emanuele Cicogna [the distinguished historian] copied this on the twenty-fourth of August 1855, from two codices existing in his collection. On the following day, the Inquisitors publicly burned the black garments, the utensils, the ‘conjuring books,’ as they are described, and [Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Ult._] all the booty Cristofoli had confiscated, while the populace, believing that it was all a case of witchcraft, danced round the fire and cheered for Saint Mark. The persons implicated were treated with the greatest indulgence, and Malamani observes that in the whole affair it was the furniture that got the worst of it. About the same time Cristofoli made a vain attempt to arrest the notorious Cagliostro.