of flesh and shored into the wood. Round the chamber, placed in all
sorts of irregular ways, were many implements of torture which made
one's heart ache to see--chairs full of spikes which gave instant and
excruciating pain; chairs and couches with dull knobs whose torture was
seemingly less, but which, though slower, were equally efficacious;
racks, belts, boots, gloves, collars, all made for compressing at will;
steel baskets in which the head could be slowly crushed into a pulp if
necessary; watchmen's hooks with long handle and knife that cut at
resistance--this a speciality of the old Nurnberg police system; and
many, many other devices for man's injury to man. Amelia grew quite pale
with the horror of the things, but fortunately did not faint, for being
a little overcome she sat down on a torture chair, but jumped up again
with a shriek, all tendency to faint gone. We both pretended that it was
the injury done to her dress by the dust of the chair, and the rusty
spikes which had upset her, and Mr. Hutcheson acquiesced in accepting
the explanation with a kind-hearted laugh.

But the central object in the whole of this chamber of horrors was the
engine known as the Iron Virgin, which stood near the centre of the
room. It was a rudely-shaped figure of a woman, something of the bell
order, or, to make a closer comparison, of the figure of Mrs. Noah in
the children's Ark, but without that slimness of waist and perfect
_rondeur_ of hip which marks the aesthetic type of the Noah family. One
would hardly have recognised it as intended for a human figure at all
had not the founder shaped on the forehead a rude semblance of a woman's
face. This machine was coated with rust without, and covered with dust;
a rope was fastened to a ring in the front of the figure, about where
the waist should have been, and was drawn through a pulley, fastened on
the wooden pillar which sustained the flooring above. The custodian
pulling this rope showed that a section of the front was hinged like a