water is shewn to visitors. What exquisite and ingenious inventions of cruelty,—what devices discovered by man to torture man! What tales of cruelty, of exquisite and frightful torture, of the breaking of bone after bone, of the wrenching of joint after joint, these cold dark vaults and chambers could tell if they could speak. Imagination shudders to think of what men and women have suffered day after day, month after month, in these dark vaults for the cause of righteousness and of liberty. Let us hope those dark days of ingenious cruelty are gone,—never to return again! Modern civilization has still much of wars and blood-shed, of conquests and cruelty to answer for, but the day of slow deliberate ingenious torture is, let us hope, gone for ever,—and it is in so far a gain in the cause of humanity.
I saw the room in which the famous Cornelius de Witt was imprisoned on a charge of conspiracy against William III. in 1672. His brother John de Witt, the Grand Pensionary, hastened to the tower to give him relief, but the infuriated populace who had been induced to believe in the guilt of the brothers forced their way into the prison, seized the two brothers and literally tore them to pieces with savage cruelty, maiming the dead bodies, ripping open the hearts and hanging them head downwards in the square outside. The scene is graphically described in one of Dumas's novels, the "Tulipe Noire," I think, but judging from the pictures one sees here of the scene, no description can sufficiently portray the horror of the scene.
Westward from this place is the Grootee kerk (church
