but Christians were not wanting to watch the blackening corpses, and, with a love like that of Rizpah, the mother of the sons of Saul, to drive from thence the fowls of the air by day, and the beasts of the field by night; and finally, when the period of prohibition was expired, reverently to gather the hallowed bones to their last resting-place in the church of Nangasaki. The Giffiaques were the next who felt the tyrant's rage. The governor himself urged on their punishment, for the loss of his friends had made him furious; and, attributing it entirely to the fact of their religion, he resolved to wreak his vengeance upon all others who professed it. "What shall I do with these men?" he cried, in a kind of savage perplexity, upon being told that the Giffiaques had rather courted than evaded their imprisonment: "Death they rejoice in, as in the acquisition of an empire, and they go to exile as a slave to freedom. The cross is a royal throne, which they mount with pleasure and occupy with pride. I will therefore contrive for them a fate which shall make death, under any form whatever, a boon to be desired, but not to be attained." Within the city walls there was a prison which the king had constructed for the reception of his debtors. Open on every side, its inmates were exposed both to the curious gaze of the passing crowds, and to the suffering of alternate heat and cold, as summer or winter revolved over their heads. There, huddled together in this enclosure, the prisoners lay, not upon mats, nor yet upon the damp cold earth, which in comparison would have been a mercy, but upon heaps of horrible filth, the accumulation of many years; for by a hideous cruelty of invention, the monster would never permit the cleansing out of these loathsome places, hoping by the disgusting condition of their dungeon to extort a speedier payment from his victims. Into this den of suffering the governor cast the three Christians whom he had selected for his prey, never doubting that they would be soon subdued by the anguish of a life more terrible than the most lingering and painful death; and so for years the Giffiaques lingered on, breathing this infected air--pillowed, sleeping and waking, on the loathsome dung which matted all the pavement, feeding upon such dry crusts and filthy water as their jailors chose to give them; until at length one among them died, and then the tyrant, weary of such willing victims, commanded the other two to be cut in pieces.