SANBENITO OF PENITENT RELAPSED. From Limborch’s ‘Historia Inquisitionis.’] What is not to be explained is why Yucé should have waited until he was strapped to the _escalera_ before making this statement. Why did he not make it when the question was asked him at his last examination--if not in his original confession? It cannot be pretended that he was endeavouring to screen Juan Franco, because he has very amply betrayed him in other ways. Is the explanation that under fear of torture he felt the need to invent an answer likely to satisfy the inquisitors? It can hardly be that, because Juan Franco himself is to admit--as we shall see--the truth of this detail. It only remains to be supposed that the lively fear of torture had sharpened the young Jew’s memory. But that again seems hardly satisfactory as an explanation. “Where,” they ask him next, “is La Hos?” “It is,” he replies, “a meadow by the River Algodor,” and he goes on to explain that Juan Franco had told them all that he had taken a load of wheat to Toledo to sell, and that, having sold it, he went to an inn, and later on he found the boy in a doorway and coaxed him away with _nuégados_ (a sweetmeat composed of flour, honey, and nuts--nougat). Thus he got him into his cart and brought him to La Guardia. Yucé doesn’t know who were the child’s parents, nor in what street of Toledo he was taken by Juan Franco, as the latter did not mention those particulars. “Who were the first to propose the affair? Did the Jews engage the Christians in it, or the Christians engage the Jews?” He answers that the Francos of La Guardia, fearing the Inquisition, performed an enchantment in the first instance with a consecrated wafer, as he has already confessed (October 11), and then repaired to Tazarte asking him to do something more efficacious, as the sorcery with the wafer had had no result. Tazarte agreed, and bade them procure a Christian boy for the purpose. When Juan Franco brought him, it was decided to cut out his heart, that with this heart and a wafer a stronger enchantment might be performed. “Why was he done to death by crucifixion rather than in any other way?” Yucé believes that the crucifixion was preferred in vituperation of Jesus Christ. But again he protests that his own share was no more than he has confessed already. “What were the particular vituperations used to the child, and by whom?” His answer to this question incriminates all those who were present at the affair; the vituperations which he tells the inquisitors were employed were rather indecent, and include a scurrilous version of the Incarnation which would, no doubt, be current at the time among Jews and other enemies of Christianity in Spain and elsewhere--a story, it is needless to add, entirely idle and foolish, and rather the obvious thing to be conceived in those days against any historical character who might be detested.