will not make it yield fruit!

In 1807, the tribunal of the Inquisition existed still at Valencia, and
at times performed its functions. The reverend fathers, it is true, did
not burn people, but they pronounced sentences in which the ridiculous
contended with the odious. During my residence in this town, the holy
office had to busy itself about a pretended sorceress; it doomed her to
go through all quarters of the town astride on an ass, her face turned
towards the tail, and naked down to the waist. Merely to observe the
commonest rules of decency, the poor woman had been plastered with a
sticky substance, partly honey, they told me, to which adhered an
enormous quantity of little feathers, so that to say the truth, the
victim resembled a fowl with a human head. The procession, whether
attended by a crowd I leave it to be imagined, stationed itself for some
time in the cathedral square, where I lived. I was told that the
sorceress was struck on the back a certain number of blows with a
shovel; but I do not venture to affirm this, for I was absent at the
moment when this hideous procession passed before my windows.

We thus see, however, what sort of spectacles were given to the people
in the commencement of the nineteenth century, in one of the principal
towns of Spain, the seat of a celebrated university, and the native
country of numerous citizens distinguished by their knowledge, their
courage, and their virtues. Let not the friends of humanity and of
civilization disunite; let them form, on the contrary, an indissoluble
union, for superstition is always on the watch, and waits for the moment
again to seize its prey.

I have mentioned in the course of my narrative that two Carthusians
often left their convent in the _Desierto de las Palmas_, and came,