follow them. Then it occurred to him that it might be for
sentence that he was summoned; and while he was weighing the
probabilities, and calling up his strength for the occasion, he reached
the door, the attendants threw it open, and he found himself in the
presence, not of his judges, but of his wife and children. Pale,
bewildered, looking timidly towards him, through eyes dim with tears,
there they stood, utterly at a loss what to say or what to do.

He felt his heart bound. But he saw the snare, and, repressing his
emotions by a powerful effort, held out his hand instead of opening his
arms, and bidding them, cheer up and give themselves no uneasiness about
him, and above all not to let their enemies fancy that either he or they
would be cast down by anything that they could do, he calmly turned to
the guards, and told them, that, if that stale trick was all they had
brought him there for, they had better take him back to his cell.

Meanwhile his friends were not idle: and he had friends, as I have
already hinted, even in the sacred college. With a cardinal on your
side, you may do many things in Rome which it would hardly answer to
venture upon without him; for who can tell but that that Cardinal may
one day be Pope? The precise nature of the accusation lodged against him
M---- never knew; but he had gathered enough from the interrogatories to
feel that he had got lightly off, when he found himself condemned to say
his prayers and read books of devotion three months in a convent, with
the privilege of walking in the garden and talking theology with the
elder brethren.

And thus the old man whom Bunyan's English Pilgrim saw in the cave by
the way-side two hundred years ago still sits there, biting his nails
and grinning, not altogether impotently, at Roman Pilgrims, to this very
day.

The Congregation of the Holy Office is composed of thirteen cardinals,
one of whom is secretary, and an assessor, a commissary, counsellors,
and several officers taken from the prelates and regular orders. The
Pope himself is Prefect. The counsellors meet on Mondays in the Palace
of the Inquisition; the whole body on Wednesdays in the Convent of the
Minerva,--where St. Dominic still smiles upon his faithful
followers,--and Thursdays before the Pope. The examination of their
records and the opening of their prisons, during the brief existence of
the "Roman Republic" of 1849, showed that these meetings were not always
mere matters o