Flanders, Douay, and Tournay, the most thriving and populous portions of
the Netherlands, with a swiftness, precision, and even with a jocularity
which hardly seemed human. There was a kind of grim humor about the man.
The woman who, according to Lear's fool, was wont to thrust her live eels
into the hot paste, "rapping them o' the coxcombs with a stick and crying
reproachfully, Wantons, lie down!" had the spirit of a true inquisitor.
Even so dealt Titelmann with his heretics writhing on the rack or in the
flames. Cotemporary chronicles give a picture of him as of some
grotesque yet terrible goblin, careering through the country by night or
day, alone, on horseback, smiting the trembling peasants on the head with
a great club, spreading dismay far and wide, dragging suspected persons
from their firesides or their beds, and thrusting them into dungeons,
arresting, torturing, strangling, burning, with hardly the shadow of
warrant, information, or process.

The secular sheriff, familiarly called Red-Rod, from the color of his
wand of office, meeting this inquisitor Titelmann one day upon the high
road, thus wonderingly addressed him--"How can you venture to go about
alone, or at most with an attendant or two, arresting people on every
side, while I dare not attempt to execute my office, except at the head
of a strong force, armed in proof; and then only at the peril of my
life?"

"Ah! Red-Rod," answered Peter, jocosely, "you deal with bad people.
I have nothing to fear, for I seize only the innocent and virtuous, who
make no resistance, and let themselves be taken like lambs."

"Mighty well," said the other; "but if you arrest all the good people
and I all the bad, 'tis difficult to say who in the world is to escape
chastisement." The reply of the inquisitor has not been recorded, but