m. He sat there studying and studying awhile to himself; then he
asked:

"How many ducats did you say?"

"Eleven hundred and seven, sir."

Then he said, as if he were talking to himself: "It is ver-y singular.
Yes... very strange. A curious coincidence." Then he began to ask
questions, and went over the whole ground from the beginning, we
answering. By and by he said: "Eleven hundred and six ducats. It is a
large sum."

"Seven," said Seppi, correcting him.

"Oh, seven, was it? Of course a ducat more or less isn't of consequence,
but you said eleven hundred and six before."

It would not have been safe for us to say he was mistaken, but we knew
he was. Nikolaus said, "We ask pardon for the mistake, but we meant to
say seven."

"Oh, it is no matter, lad; it was merely that I noticed the discrepancy.
It is several days, and you cannot be expected to remember precisely.
One is apt to be inexact when there is no particular circumstance to
impress the count upon the memory."

"But there was one, sir," said Seppi, eagerly.

"What was it, my son?" asked the astrologer, indifferently.

"First, we all counted the piles of coin, each in turn, and all made it
the same--eleven hundred and six. But I had slipped one out, for fun,
when the count began, and now I slipped it back and said, 'I think there
is a mistake--there are eleven hundred and seven; let us count again.'
We did, and of course I was right. They were astonished; then I told how
it came about."

The astrologer asked us if this was so, and we said it was.

"That settles it," he said. "I know the thief now. Lads, the money was
stolen."

Then he went away, leaving us very much troubled, and wondering what he
could mean. In about an hour we found out; for by that time it was all
over the village that Father Peter had been arrested for stealing a
great sum of money from the astrologer. Everybody's tongue was loose and
going. Many said it was not in Father Peter's character and must be a
mistake; but the others shook their heads and said misery and want could
drive a suffering man to almost anything. About one detail there were
no differences; all agreed that Father Peter's account of how the
money came into his hands was just about unbelievable--it had such an
impossible look. They said it might have come into the astrologer's
hands in some such way, but into Father Peter's, never! Our characters
began to suffer now. We were Father Peter's only witnesses; ho