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By no twisting and turning could I loosen the rope that Brother Thomas had bound me in, with a hand well taught by cruel practice. At last the rain in my face grew like a water-torture, always dropping, and I half turned my face and pressed it to the ground.

"We shall try that presently," said an Inquisitor, giving a signal for the torture. The prisoner underwent the first and second applications with unshrinking courage, but on the infliction of the water-torture, which is indeed insupportable to humanity, either to suffer or relate, he exclaimed in the gasping interval, he would disclose everything.

It is noticeable, too, that neither the officers nor the men of any colored regiment have figured in the charges and counter-charges arising out of the use of the water-torture, except one man who at the time of his offense was not with his regiment. The Forty-ninth Volunteers was a very unhappy regiment during its brief life, but its troubles were largely due to its white officers.

The garrucha or strappado and the garrotes, combined with the water-torture and the rack, represented the survival of the fittest in the natural selection of torments concerning which the Holy Office in Italy and Spain had such a vast experience. He gives an elaborate and epicurean account of his commissariat during the successive seasons of his sojourn in the neighbourhood.

The man in the red cravat was threatened with the strappado, with the water-torture, with the brodequins, and finally with the devil's cannon which, according to our man-at-arms, was to be planted on the opposite bank of the ravine, and which would infallibly bring the whole of their wretched town tumbling down into the gulf like swallows' nests from under the eaves.