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Rh to drive the wedges home. The wedge for each leg was carefully adjusted, and the strong man stood with the hammer raised over his head, ready to strike, and the pale and agonised John Fian was asked if he would even now confess. He clenched his teeth, and the perspiration moistened upon his white cheeks the dried blood from the circular wound which the torture-rope had cut to his skull; but no word of confession escaped from his lips. Down came the hammer, and the agonised man uttered a shriek that rang through the torture-chamber; but no man pitied; and many pious persons mocked and laughed at the awful cry of the sufferer, whom they alleged that his master, the devil, had now deserted. Down came the hammer upon the other wedge, crushing the other leg in the most fearful fashion; but still John Fian, who had raised the ocean waves to wreck King James, would not confess. Down came the hammer again and again upon each wedge alternately, till the skin and flesh and muscle and tendon and bone and marrow were one mass of soft and bloody jelly; and then, by some sign which he made in the borderland between unconsciousness and excruciating agony, it was understood that he had agreed to confess. They hammered out the wedges and laid down John Fian upon his back, with his legs crushed to pulp, and with his head swollen, lacerated, and ghastly, and gathered round to hear his confession. And what kind of confession could be wrung from a human being in such a terrible plight? He was, of course, raving mad. They left him till next day. Next day he recanted the whole of the confession which, in his delirium of suffering, they alleged they had extorted from him. They attributed this contumacy to his having been again visited and re-supported by Satan. Again they subjected him to the torture. They wrenched the nails off his fingers with a blacksmith's pincers, and stuck pins through the parts which the nails had protected. This extorted no confession. They put his thumbs into the thumbscrews, till the bones were crushed and splintered to pieces; but this extorted no confession. His unflinching heroism was attributed to the support extended to him by the devil. Their victim was, already, more dead than alive-more delirious than sane. They