woman the three mysterious
items contained in the paper. After he had explained to her what she
must disclose in disconnected and incoherent fashion, about certain
measures which had been taken to get possession, either by strategy or
by force, of this paper which was of the utmost importance to the
Saxon court, he charged her to demand of Kohlhaas that he should give
the paper to her to keep during a few fateful days, on the pretext
that it was no longer safe with him.

As was to be expected, the woman undertook the execution of this
business at once on the promise of a considerable reward, a part of
which the Chamberlain, at her demand, had to pay over to her in
advance. As the mother of Herse, the groom who had fallen at
Muehlberg, had permission from the government to visit Kohlhaas at
times, and this woman had already known her for several months, she
succeeded a few days later in gaining access to the horse-dealer by
means of a small gratuity to the warden.

But when the woman entered his room, Kohlhaas, from a seal ring that
she wore on her hand and a coral chain that hung round her neck,
thought that he recognized in her the very same old gipsy-woman who
had handed him the paper in Jueterbock; and since probability is not
always on the side of truth, it so happened that here something had
occurred which we will indeed relate, but at the same time, to those
who wish to question it we must accord full liberty to do so. The
Chamberlain had made the most colossal blunder, and in the aged
old-clothes woman, whom he had picked up in the streets of Berlin to
impersonate the gipsy, he had hit upon the very same mysterious
gipsy-woman whom he wished to have impersonated. At least, while
leaning on her crutches and stroking the cheeks of the children who,
intimidated by her singular appearance, were pressing close to their
father, the woman informed the latter that she had returned to
Brandenburg from Saxony some time before, and that after an unguarded
question which the Chamberlain had hazarded in the streets of Berlin
about the gipsy-woman who had been in Jueterbock in the spring of the
previous year, she had immediately pressed forward to him, and under a
false name had offered herself for the business which he wished to see
done.

The horse-dealer remarked such a strange likeness between her and his
dead wife Lisbeth that he might have asked the old woman whether she
were his wife's grandmother; for not only did