the
torture chamber, stripping, and the tying of the rope in readiness for
its appliance. To increase the terror these preliminaries excited, a
pang of physical pain was added by tightening a cord round the wrists.
This often sufficed to extract a confession from women or men of highly
strung nerves.

The second degree, or severe torture, consisted in fastening the
sufferer, stripped naked, and his hands tied behind his back, by the
wrists to one end of a rope passed round a pulley bolted into the vaulted
ceiling, the other end being attached to a windlass, by turning which he
could be hoisted, into the air, and dropped again, either slowly or with
a jerk, as ordered by the judge. The suspension generally lasted during
the recital of a Pater Noster, an Ave Maria, or a Miserere; if the
accused persisted in his denial, it was doubled. This second degree, the
last of the ordinary torture, was put in practice when the crime appeared
reasonably probable but was not absolutely proved.

The third, or very severe, the first of the extraordinary forms of
torture, was so called when the sufferer, having hung suspended by the
wrists, for sometimes a whole hour, was swung about by the executioner,
either like the pendulum of a clock, or by elevating him with the
windlass and dropping him to within a foot or two of the ground. If he
stood this torture, a thing almost unheard of, seeing that it cut the
flesh of the wrist to the bone and dislocated the limbs, weights were
attached to the feet, thus doubling the torture. This last form of
torture was only applied when an atrocious crime had been proved to have
been committed upon a sacred person, such as a priest, a cardinal, a
prince, or an eminent and learned man.

Having seen that Beatrice was sentenced to the torture ordinary and
extraordinary, and having explained the nature of these tortures, we
proceed to quote the official report:--

"And as in reply to every question she would confess nothing, we caused
her to be taken by two officers and led from the prison to the torture
chamber, where the torturer was in attendance; there, after cutting off
her hair, he made her sit on a small stool, undressed her, pulled off her
shoes, tied her hands behind her back, fastened them to a rope passed
over a pulley bolted into the ceiling of the aforesaid chamber, and wound
up at the other end by a four lever windlass, worked by two men."

"Before hoisting her from the ground we again