Mr. Pearsall pursued his inquiries with indefatigable industry in the German cities, and made many discoveries in secret “torture chambers.” “Many persons of the better class,” he remarks, “to whom I spoke on the subject, denied that the Virgin had ever existed in Austria; but my _laquais de place_, and others of the lower class, told me, that when they were young, it was said to be standing in a tower which hangs over the canal that runs through Vienna into the Danube, and that whenever the water there looked a little red (as was usually the case after a storm), nothing was more common than to hear people say, ‘So, the Virgin has been at her work again.’” Mr. Pearsall made important discoveries at Nuremberg. There he was aided by Dr. Mayer, keeper of the archives of the city. “Dr. Mayer told me,” says he, “that the passage from the Chronicle, quoted by Siebenkees, was no fable; that the machine had formerly stood in a vault near to the _Sieben Zeiler_, and that he himself had seen part of the machinery which belonged to it, although the figure itself had disappeared. ‘The figure,’ said he, ‘stood at the brink of a trap-door; and when the individual who had suffered by its embraces was released from them, he fell downwards through it on a sort of cradle of swords, placed in a vault underneath, and which were arranged so as to cut his body in pieces, which dropped into running water, over which the machine stood.’ “Desirous of seeing the spot where the Virgin stood, I procured permission to visit it from the city architect, who sent me the keys by a man named Kiefer. This man has been a long time in the employment of the magistrates, and he accompanied Dr. Mayer and myself to the spot in question. He was a stranger to Dr. Mayer; but he had himself, many years back, been in the vault. He found no stream of water there, although the place was extremely wet and damp; and on one side of the vault, which was drier than the other, _there was a sort of grave, in which were many human skulls and bones_. He told me that in his youth he had known an old man, named Kaiferlin, who had seen the machine in a perfect state. He stated, also, that Kaiferlin told him, that two or three days before the entry of the French into Nuremberg, the Virgin and all the instruments of torture formerly kept in the place where she was, were taken away by night in a cart, and that neither she nor they had ever been heard of since.” Mr. Pearsall at length found this Virgin in the Castle of Feistritz. Baron Diedrich informed him, “I bought it of a person who obtained it, _with the left hand_, during the French revolution, and had with it a great part of the contents of the arsenal of Nuremberg. From him I received it _in a cart_, with several things which had formerly belonged to that arsenal. It came to me rusted and in bad condition, deprived of its machinery, but accompanied by the pedestal on which it now stands, and which seems to have been made for it.”