All the devices of inquisitorial ingenuity were employed to ensnare
the old man, and to draw from him evidence that might be brought
against himself, and might corroborate certain secret information that
had been given against him. He had been accused of practising
necromancy and judicial astrology, and a cloud of evidence had been
secretly brought forward to substantiate the charge. It would be
tedious to enumerate all the circumstances, apparently corroborative,
which had been industriously cited by the secret accuser. The silence
which prevailed about the tower, its desolateness, the very quiet of
its inhabitants, had been adduced as proofs that something sinister
was perpetrated within. The alchymist's conversations and soliloquies
in the garden had been overheard and misrepresented. The lights and
strange appearances at night, in the tower, were given with violent
exaggerations. Shrieks and yells were said to have been heard from
thence at midnight, when, it was confidently asserted, the old man
raised familiar spirits by his incantations, and even compelled the
dead to rise from their graves, and answer to his questions.
The alchymist, according to the custom of the inquisition, was kept in
complete ignorance of his accuser; of the witnesses produced against
him; even of the crimes of which he was accused.
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