This must have been the prison in which George Borrow was confined when that enterprising Englishman was arrested for endeavouring to circulate the Bible in Spain, as the agent and representative of the British Bible Society in 1835 and the following years. His experiences as told by himself constitute one of the most thrilling books of adventure in the English language, and his strangely interesting personality will long be remembered and admired. He had led a very varied life, had wandered the world over as the friend and associate of those curious people, the gipsies, whose "crabbed" language he spoke with fluency and to whose ways and customs he readily conformed. Readers whom his "Lavengro" and "The Romany Rye" have delighted will bear witness to the daring and intrepid character which carried him safely through many difficult and dangerous situations. He was a man of great stature, well trained in the art of self defence, as he proved by his successful contest with the "Flaming Tinker" described in "Lavengro." The bigoted Spanish authorities caught a Tartar in Borrow. It was easy to arrest him as he was nothing loth to go to gaol; he had long been thinking, as he tells us, "of paying a visit to the prison, partly in the hope of being able to say a few words of Christian instruction to the criminals and partly with a view to making certain investigations in the robber language of Spain." But, once in, he refused to come out. He took high ground; his arrest had been unlawful; he had never been tried or condemned and nothing would satisfy him but a full and complete apology from the Spanish government. He was strongly backed up by the British Ambassador and he was gratified in the end by the almost abject surrender of the authorities. But he spent three weeks within the walls and we have to thank his indomitable spirit for a glimpse into the gloomy recesses of the Carcel de la Corte, the chief prison, at that time, of the capital of Spain. The arrest was made openly in one of the principal streets of Madrid by a couple of _alguazils_ who carried their prisoner to the office of the _corregidor_, or chief magistrate, where he was abruptly informed that he was to be forthwith committed to gaol. He was led across the Plaza Mayor, the great square so often the scene in times past of the _autos da fé_. Borrow, as he went, cast his eyes at the balcony of the city hall where, on one occasion, "the last of the Austrian line in Spain (Philip II) sat, and, after some thirty heretics of both sexes had been burnt by fours and fives, wiped his face perspiring with heat and black with smoke and calmly inquired, '_No hay mas?_'" (No more to come?) for which exemplary proof of patience he was much applauded by his priests and confessors, who subsequently poisoned him.