rds, great
double-handed weapons with broad blade and keen edge. Hard by were
several blocks whereon the necks of the victims had lain, with here
and there deep notches where the steel had bitten through the guard of
flesh and shored into the wood. Round the chamber, placed in all sorts
of irregular ways, were many implements of torture which made one's
heart ache to see--chairs full of spikes which gave instant and
excruciating pain; chairs and couches with dull knobs whose torture
was seemingly less, but which, though slower, were equally
efficacious; racks, belts, boots, gloves, collars, all made for
compressing at will; steel baskets in which the head could be slowly
crushed into a pulp if necessary; watchmen's hooks with long handle
and knife that cut at resistance--this a speciality of the old
Nurnberg police system; and many, many other devices for man's injury
to man. Amelia grew quite pale with the horror of the things, but
fortunately did not faint, for being a little overcome she sat down on
a torture chair, but jumped up again with a shriek, all tendency to
faint gone. We both pretended that it was the injury done to her dress
by the dust of the chair, and the rusty spikes which had upset her,
and Mr. Hutcheson acquiesced in accepting the explanation with a
kind-hearted laugh.

But the central object in the whole of this chamber of horrors was the
engine known as the Iron Virgin, which stood near the centre of the
room. It was a rudely-shaped figure of a woman, something of the bell
order, or, to make a closer comparison, of the figure of Mrs. Noah in
the children's Ark, but without that slimness of waist and perfect
_rondeur_ of hip which marks the aesthetic type of the Noah family.
One would hardly have recognised it as intended for a human figure at
all had not the founder shaped on the forehead a rude semblance of a
woman's face. This machine was coated with rust without, and covered
with dust; a rope was fastened to a ring in the front of the figure,
about where the waist should have been, and was drawn through a
pulley, fastened on the wooden pillar which sustained the flooring
above. The custodian pulling this rope showed that a section of the
front was hinged like a door at one side; we then saw that the engine
was of considerable thickness, leaving just room enough inside for a
man to be placed. The door was of equal thickness and of great weight,
for it took the custodian all his strength, aided t