Page:John Huss, his life, teachings and death, after five hundred years.pdf/252

 exceedingly pale—valde pallidus. He was worn out not only with the anxiety of prolonged imprisonment, but with aggravated ailments—hemorrhages and vomiting, the stone, headache and toothache—so that, as he himself wrote, his nights were spent without sleep. What snatches of sleep he caught were disturbed by dreams. Among many others was the vision of hosts of serpents with heads at their tails, but not one able to harm him.

The comfort of receiving communications from his friends was not entirely withdrawn. Letters found their way to him, and he asked that they be not written on large sheets lest they arouse suspicion and fail to reach his cell. Toward the end of the period, perhaps with reference to Paul’s letters written from his captivity in Rome, he closed letter after letter with the words, “written in prison in chains,” or “bound in prison in chains, expecting death,” or “written in chains in expectation of the flames.“

The respite before his auto-da-fe was evidently prolonged in order that no effort might be spared to induce Huss to abjure. He was interviewed by many persons, sent to persuade him to that act. Baskets, as he called them, were held out to him, by which, if he chose to put himself in them, he might escape. Threats and persuasions were employed, let us hope, more from the sentiment of mercy than from the ambition to break up a heretic’s obduracy.

Among those who visited him were Zabarella, d’Ailly and Palecz. One doctor, who urged him to submit, declared that if the council should tell him he had but one eye, he was bound to agree that it was so. To this suggestion Huss replied that if the whole world told him he had but one eye, yet he could not, so long as he had reason, say so without doing violence to his conscience. After some further remarks the doctor left, saying that Huss was right and that the illustration was not a good one.