5
ascended the first flight of stairs, a porter habited in black opened the tremendous barricade, and Nicolas with horror, heard the grating of the heavy bolts that shut him in. He was led through passages and vaults, and melancholy cells, till he was delivered into the dungeon, where he was finally left to bis solitary meditations. Hapless being! what a scene of horror! Nicolas felt all the terrors of his condition, but being an Andalusian, and, like his countrymen, of a lively imagination, he began to turn over all the resources of his invention for some happy fetch, if any such might occur, for helping him out of the dismal limbo be was in : he had not long to seek for the cause of his misfortune; his adventure with the barefooted friars was a ready solution of all difficulties of that nature, had there been any; there was. however, another thing, which might have troubled a stouter heart than Nicolas’s———he was a Jew. This, of a certain, would have been a staggering item in a poor devil’s confession, but then it was a secret to all the world but Nicolas, and Nicolas’s conscience did not then urge him to reveal it. He now began to overhaul the inventory of his personals about him, and with some satisfaction counted three little medals of the blessed Virgin, two Agnus Deis, a Saint Nicolas de Tolentino, and a formidable string of beads, all pendant from his neck, and within his shirt; in his pockets he had a paper of dried figs, a small bundle of segars, a case of lancets, squirt and forceps, and two old razors in a leathern envelope: these he had delivered one by one to the algunzil, who
