The king had promulgated a decree holding the municipal authorities answerable with their lives for the preservation of peace and public order within their jurisdiction. A few nights later, wandering, heavily cloaked as we may suppose, through a dark alley, a gentleman brushed rudely against him. A brawl ensued, swords were drawn, and Pedro ran his subject through the body. Flattering himself that there had been no witness to the encounter, he stalked away. In the morning the hidalgo’s body was found, but there appeared to be no clue as to the assassin. The king summoned the Alcalde and reminded him of the edict. If the miscreant were not discovered within two days the luckless magistrate must himself pay the penalty on the scaffold. It was a situation with precisely the humorous aspect that Pedro relished. But presently to the Alcalde came an old lady with a strange but welcome story. She told how she had seen a fight between two gentlemen, the previous night, from her bed-chamber window. She witnessed the fatal termination, and lo! the light of her candle fell full on the face of the murderer; and as he bent forward, she heard his knee crack. By his features and by this well-known physical peculiarity, she recognised, beyond all possibility of a mistake, the king. Next day the Alcalde invited his sovereign to attend the execution of the criminal. Greatly wondering, no doubt, Pedro came. Dangling from a rope he beheld his own effigy. “It is well,” he said, after an ominous pause. “Justice has been done. I am satisfied.” We may be inclined to disagree with the king’s conception of justice as evinced on this occasion. More equitable and humorous was his action when a priest, for murdering a shoemaker, was condemned by his ecclesiastical superiors to suspension from his sacerdotal functions for twelve months. Pedro thereupon decreed that any tradesman who slew a priest should be punished by being restrained from exercising his trade for the like period! The catalogue of this Castilian monarch’s crimes proves interesting if gloomy reading. He left his wife, Blanche de Bourbon, to perish in a dungeon; he married Juana de Castro and insultingly repudiated her within forty-eight hours; he put to death his father’s mistress, Leonor de Guzman. He threw the young daughter of his brother, Enrique de Trastamara, naked to the lions, like some Christian virgin-martyr. But the good-humoured (and possibly well-fed) brutes refused to touch the proffered prey. Not wishing to be outdone in generosity by a wild beast, Pedro ever afterwards treated the maiden kindly. She was known, in remembrance of her terrible experience, as Leonor de los Leones.