tments. Soon after, three or four vile fiends,--for they do not
deserve the name of men,--bound him with strong cords and hanged him to
a beam. Then they began to charge him with having prosecuted a certain
Mason, and inflicted upon him the most frightful tortures. The pen
refuses to set forth so many atrocities. For three days they had him
in that position while his vile assassins made a martyr of him. Our
hair stands on end to think of such crimes. The heart-rending cries
of this unfortunate man while prey to such barbarous torments could
be heard in every part of the town and carried panic to the homes of
all the inhabitants.

"The late hours of the night were always chosen by those treacherous
fiends to give Piera the _trato de cuerda_ (this form of torture
consists in tying the hands of the victim behind his back and hanging
him by them by a rope passed through a pulley attached to a beam;
his body is lifted as high as it will go and then allowed to fall
by its own weight without reaching the ground); but this torture was
administered to him in a form so terrible that all the pictures of this
kind of torment found in the dreadful narratives of the calumniators
of the Holy Office, pale into insignificance in comparison with the
atrocious details of the tortures here recited; at each violent jerk
the unhappy victim feeling that his limbs were being torn asunder
would cry out 'My God! My God!' This terrifying cry reverberating
through the jail would freeze the very blood of the poor priests
therein incarcerated.

"On the third day, when those infuriated hyenas appeared to have
spent their diabolical rage; after they had thrust a red-hot iron
into his eyes and left him with sightless sockets; the poor martyr,
the prey of delirium, cried out that he was hungry, and one of those
_sicarii_ cut a piece of flesh from Piera's thigh and was infamous
enough to carry it to his mouth. On the night of the seventh of the
month very late a number of wretches buried in the _convento_ garden
a body still dripping warm blood from the lips of which there escaped
the feeble plaints of anguish of a dying man."

The feeling of the Spaniards relative to this matter is well shown
by the following statement of Father Malumbres:--

"This horrible crime cannot be pardoned by God or man, and is still
uninvestigated, crying to Heaven for vengeance with greater reason
than the blood of the innocent Abel. So long as the criminals remain
unpun