ts, nor
torture had any effect upon her; she bore everything unflinchingly, and
the judge Ulysses Moscati himself, famous though he was in such matters,
failed to draw from her a single incriminating word. Unwilling to take
any further responsibility, he referred the case to Clement VIII; and the
pope, conjecturing that the judge had been too lenient in applying the
torture to, a young and beautiful Roman lady, took it out of his hands
and entrusted it to another judge, whose severity and insensibility to
emotion were undisputed.

This latter reopened the whole interrogatory, and as Beatrice up to that
time had only been subjected to the ordinary torture, he gave
instructions to apply both the ordinary and extraordinary. This was the
rope and pulley, one of the most terrible inventions ever devised by the
most ingenious of tormentors.

To make the nature of this horrid torture plain to our readers, we give a
detailed description of it, adding an extract of the presiding judge's
report of the case, taken from the Vatican manuscripts.

Of the various forms of torture then used in Rome the most common were
the whistle, the fire, the sleepless, and the rope.

The mildest, the torture of the whistle, was used only in the case of
children and old persons; it consisted in thrusting between the nails and
the flesh reeds cut in the shape of whistles.

The fire, frequently employed before the invention of the sleepless
torture, was simply roasting the soles of the feet before a hot fire.

The sleepless torture, invented by Marsilius, was worked by forcing the
accused into an angular frame of wood about five feet high, the sufferer
being stripped and his arms tied behind his back to the frame; two men,
relieved every five hours, sat beside him, and roused him the moment he
closed his eyes. Marsilius says he has never found a man proof against
this torture; but here he claims more than he is justly entitled to.
Farinacci states that, out of one hundred accused persons subjected to
it, five only refused to confess--a very satisfactory result for the
inventor.

Lastly comes the torture of the rope and pulley, the most in vogue of
all, and known in other Latin countries as the strappado.

It was divided into three degrees of intensity--the slight, the severe,
and the very severe.

The first, or slight torture, which consisted mainly in the apprehensions
it caused, comprised the threat of severe torture, introduction into