this noisiest and densest of markets. Pass down the Street of the Silversmiths to the Church of the Profesa, from whose top and whose street-corner we first contemplated the city. It is a majestic, cooling edifice. Its high roof and darkened light makes it one of the pleasantest of temples. Leave that and go straight across to the eastern side of the town. Behind the cathedral, half a mile away, you will see a long narrow square. On one side now is the custom-house; at its lower end is a church, with its high fence. Before it are big wagons, with their triple set of mules resting by their side, and their dark muleteers lying beneath the wagons.
In the centre of this square not many years ago stood an iron post. A dead wall on the side opposite the custom-house shows' many a break in its surface, the size of a finger-end or larger. If, now, I were Victor Hugo, I should strike an attitude, and begin to make up the surprises. What mean these preparatory strokes? That now tame-looking building, which the government officials occupy, was once the Convent of Santo Domingo: that church fronting us was the temple of that name.
Still no light? he would say, in a line by itself.
The order of Saint Dominic had the Inquisition in charge. Ah yes! now it begins to glimmer. That mass of buildings was the dungeon of the church. There its victims were confined, tried, racked, and killed, save such as were reserved for the extremest punishment of fire. That church was where its priests and prelates performed their stately services. That iron pillar in the centre of the place, where the mule-wagons are, was where the burnings took place, for the repression of heresy. Mr. Black, long consul-general, a venerable gentleman of seventy, told me he saw the pillar when he first came here some fifty years ago, and its use for such purpose was never then denied. The Inquisition was then in full power, and had its authority been questioned, or that of the Church, its fires would have been relighted in this place.
A few years since, in digging away some of these buildings to open and widen the streets, a prison was discovered in which four skeletons were found as they had been left to starve by their sa-
