About twenty years since, a Jewish merchant and his wife, being childless, adopted a niece, who grew up beautiful, affectionate, and the delight of their old age. Like many other children of the community, she had been sent in her infancy to be nursed by a peasant-woman in the country, whose extreme poverty alone induced her to stoop to what is considered the degradation of rearing a Jewish child. This woman, dying when the girl was about eighteen, divulged to the priest who attended her death-bed that she had baptized her nursling, then an infant of only a few months old; but had ever since kept the secret shut up in her own heart, where it gnawed and preyed upon her. The confessor applauded her for her zeal, declaring that by her instrumentality a soul was rescued from perdition; and scarcely had she breathed her last, when he hastened to the Inquisition in Ancona, and announced the discovery he had made.
Without a moment's delay, a body of Dominican monks, the implacable enemies of the Jews, accompanied by the requisite officials of the police, repaired to the merchant's house, and peremptorily demanded that his niece, as a Christian convert, baptized in infancy by her nurse, should be given up to them. The most frantic remonstrances proved unavailing; she was torn from her adopted parents, and placed in a convent, as well for the purpose of religious instruction, as to secure her from all intercourse with her family.
Meantime, the poor uncle took the most energetic measures for her liberation, and secretly wrote, exhorting her to hold firm, with the promise of 10,000 dollars for her dowry, if she succeeded in returning to him. The letter was intercepted, and fell into the hands of the priests, who did not, however, bring it forward until their plans were matured. He was kept for some months in suspense, being in total ignorance of his niece's proceedings, and denied all correspondence with her; when it was at length intimated to him that she had readily imbibed the tenets of her religion, was happy at her miraculous deliverance, and willing to receive a husband at the hands of her spiritual directors: in furtherance of which desirable end, the sum of money he had proffered in the event of her restoration to him, was now claimed as her marriage-portion. Inexpressibly mortified and indignant, he yet had no alternative but to submit, and the dowry was made over to the ecclesiastical authorities.