in the best chamber, I fetched
forth the elecampane wine which I had ever found the best remedy when
my cousin needed some strength. Nor was my care in vain; for when I had
told her, little by little, as it were in small doses, all the tidings
I had heard yesterday, and ended with the great and cruel price demanded
by the Sultan, she shrieked aloud and clasped her hands to her heart in
such wise that I was verily in great fear. Then the elecampane wine did
good service; yet was it not till she had drunk of it many times that
her tongue spoke plainly again. And presently, when she was able to
wag it, it went on for a long time with no pause nor rest, in sheer
impatience and godless railing.

When she had thus relieved her mind, she began pacing up and down the
floor on one and the same plank, like a lion in its cage, and to call to
mind, one by one, all our earthly possessions, and to reckon at how
we might attain to selling it for gold. The whole sum was not much to
comfort us, for her worldly estate, like that of the Waldstromers, was
in land, and in these days of peril from the Hussites it was hard enough
to sell landed property, and her best portion was in meads and pasture
and a few vineyards near Wurzburg.

It was from the first her fixed intent, as though it were a matter of
course, to give everything she had, down to her jewels; and whereas
she conceived, and rightly, that for Herdegen's sake I should be
like-minded, she asked me no questions but added to it in her mind, the
Schopper jewels which had come to me from my father and mother, and then
began to count and reckon. It might perchance come to so much as eleven
thousand sequins if we sold all we had to sell; yet our inheritance lay
in Chancery, and, as she knew full well, not a farthing thereof might
be given up but with the full and well-proven authority of Herdegen and
Kunz. Nor might I even have that which was mine own, by reason that our
inheritance had never been shared, and our houses and lands had not been
valued at a price. Thus I must have long patience or ever I came by my
own; all the more so whereas the gentlemen of the Chancery were required
to answer for the wealth of orphans in their keeping with their own.

Hereupon we again thought of my grand-uncle, and Cousin Maud declared
that he would of a certainty be ready to pay half the required ransom
for a purpose so pleasing in the eyes of God, and that the other half
might be raised by the he