enes may be expected throughout the work. It
needs only be premised that Beatrice, in our extract, is the co-heroine of
the _Heiress of Bruges_, and is sacrificed by the Inquisition in
Brussels:--

A law of the Emperor Charles V., passed half a century before, had decreed
the frightful punishment of living burial against female heretics, and
many executions of the kind had varied by their bloodless atrocity the
horrid butcheries committed all through the Low Countries during the
tyranny of Alva. After that period such sacrifices had been less frequent;
but as late as three years before the date of our story, an instance of
this barbarity had publicly taken place in Brussels, by the orders of
Albert, who at that time held the highest dignity of the Christian
priesthood, next to that of its supreme head. A poor servant girl, named
Anne Vanderhove, arrested on a charge of heresy, refused, in all the pride
of martyrdom, to renounce her faith. She was condemned to the grave--not
to the common occupancy of that cold refuge of the lifeless body, but to
all the horrors of living contact and hopeless struggles with the
suffocating clay. She suffered her punishment, in the midst of a crowd of
curious fanatics; but such was the disgust inspired by the spectacle, that
it was thought impolitic to hazard in the face of day another exhibition
of the kind. Beatrice's judges, therefore, after a summary hearing,
decreed that she too should be buried alive--but at night. She heard her
sentence, in just sufficient exercise of reason to comprehend and shudder
at it. But her mind, wandering and unsettled, had not force enough to
dwell on the contemplation of what awaited her, and unconscious of her
approaching fate gave her the semblance of indifference.

But Beatrice, with all her pride, and almost unfeminine force of character,
was not proof against a fate so horrible. As the hour drew nigh when she
was to be led forth to execution, the blood in her throbbing veins seemed
suddenly frozen, like the hot streams of lava checked in its molten flow.
Her blanched cheeks and starting eyeballs told that her fever was quenched,
and her insensibility awakened to a full sense of her terror.

In darkness and silence the sad procession moved from the prison's most
private door, on the night fixed for the execution, the third after the
hapless girl's arrival in Brussels. The persons employed were few; no
sympathizing crowd attended to strain the victim