nd day and night prisoners were secured in total darkness, in an
atmosphere which even now seems too oppressive to bear. In close
proximity to these dungeons is a strong stone room, about twelve feet
wide each way, into which you descend by three steps. It is the
torture-chamber. The massive bars before you are all that remain of the
perpendicular rack, upon which unfortunates were hung with weights
attached to their ankles. Two such of stone, weighing each fifty pounds,
were kept here some years back, as well as many other implements of
torture since removed or sold for old iron. The raised stone bench
around the room was for the use of the executioner and attendants. The
vaulted roof condensed the voice of the tortured man, and an aperture on
one side gave it freedom to ascend into the room above, where the
judicial listeners waited for the faltering words which succeeded the
agonising screams of their victim. So much we know and still see, but
worse horrors were dreamily spoken of by the old Nuernbergers; there was
a tradition of a certain something that not only destroyed life, but
annihilated the body of the person sacrificed. The tradition took a more
definite form in the seventeenth century, and the "kiss of the Virgin"
expressed this punishment, and was believed to consist in a figure of
the Virgin, which clasped its victim in arms furnished with poignards,
and then opening them, dropped the body down a trap on a sort of cradle
of swords, arranged so as to cut it to pieces, a running stream below
clearing all traces of it away.

[Illustration: Fig. 256.--The Torture-chamber.]

These frightful traditions were received with doubt by many, and with
positive disbelief by others, until a countryman of our own, with
unexampled patience and perseverance, fully substantiated the truth of
all, and after many years traced the absolute "Virgin" herself, which
had been hurriedly removed from Nuernberg during the French Revolution,
two or three days before the French army entered the town, and then
passed into the collection of a certain Baron Diedrich, and was kept by
him in a castle called Feistritz, on the borders of Steinmark.
Determined to persevere in tracing this figure, our countryman visited
this castle in 1834, and there was the machine; it was formed of bars
and hoops covered with sheet iron, representing a Nuernberg maiden of the
sixteenth century in the long mantle generally worn. It opened with
folding doors,