Amidon's horror was modified by the evidences of repressed glee with which this sentence was received. Yet he felt a good deal of concern as they brought out a great chest, threw the struggling Stevens into it, slammed down the ponderous lid and locked it. Stevens kicked at the lid, but said nothing. The members leaped with joy. A great chain was brought and wrapped clankingly about the chest. "Let me out," now yelled the Christian Martyr. "Let me out, damn you!" "Doom, do-o-o-oom!" roared the voices; and said the Sovereign Pontiff in impressive tones, "Proceed with the execution!" Now the chest was slung up to a hook in the ceiling, and gradually drawn back by a pulley until it was far above the heads of the men, the chains meanwhile clanking continually against the receptacle, from which came forth a stream of smothered profanity. "Hurl him down to the traitor's death!" shouted the Sovereign Pontiff. The chest was loosed, and swung like a pendulum lengthwise of the room, down almost to the floor and up nearly to the ceiling. The profanity now turned into a yell of terror. The Martyrs slapped one another's backs and grew blue in the face with laughter. At a signal, a light box was placed where the chest would crush it (which it did with a sound like a small railway collision); the chest was stopped and the lid raised. "Let the body receive Christian burial," said the Sovereign Pontiff. "Our vengeance ceases with death." This truly Christian sentiment was received with universal approval. Death seemed to all a good place at which to stop. "Brethren," said the Deacon Militant, as he struggled with the resurgent Stevens, "there seems some life here! Methinks the heart beats, and--" The remainder of the passage from the ritual was lost to Amidon by reason of the fact that Stevens had placed one foot against the Deacon's stomach and hurled that august officer violently to the floor. "Let every test of life be applied," said the Sovereign Pontiff. "Perchance some higher will than ours decrees his preservation. Take the body hence for a time; if possible, restore him to life, and we will consider his fate." The recess which followed was clearly necessary to afford an opportunity for the calming of the risibilities of the Martyrs. The stage, too, had to be reset. Amidon's ethnological studies had not equaled his reading in _belles-lettres_, and he was unable to see the deep significance of these rites from an historical standpoint, and that here was a survival of those orgies to which our painted and skin-clad ancestors devoted themselves in spasms of religious frenzy, gazed at by the cave-bear and the mammoth. The uninstructed Amidon regarded them as inconceivable horse-play. While thus he mused, Stevens, who was still hoodwinked and being greatly belectured on the virtue of Faith and the duty of Obedience, reentered on his ordeal.