f making the young imposter dismount from her high horse, as I
had done in similar cases in England and Metz.

We set to work; and, far from resisting, the girl said she would be only
too glad to get rid of the troublesome burden.

I saw that the difficulty only proceeded from the way she held herself,
and I ought to have whipped her, as I had done in Venice twenty-five
years ago, but I was foolish enough to try to take the citadel by storm.
But my age of miracles was gone.

I wearied myself to no purpose for a couple of hours, and then went to my
inn, leaving the young Prussian to do his best.

I went to bed with a pain in my side, and after six hours' sleep awoke
feeling thoroughly ill. I had pleurisy. My landlord called in an old
doctor, who refused to let me blood. A severe cough came on, and the next
day I began to spit blood. In six or seven days the malady became so
serious that I was confessed and received the last sacraments.

On the tenth day, the disease having abated for three days, my clever old
doctor answered for my life, but I continued to spit blood till the
eighteenth day.

My convalescence lasted for three weeks, and I found it more trying than
the actual illness, for a man in pain has no time to grow weary.
Throughout the whole case I was tended day and night by a strange woman,
of whom I knew nothing. She nursed me with the tenderest care, and I
awaited my recovery to give her my sincere thanks.

She was not an old woman, neither was she attractive looking. She had
slept in my room all the time. After Eastertide, feeling I was well
enough to venture out, I thanked her to the best of my ability, and asked
who had sent her to me. She told me it was the doctor, and so bade me
farewell.

A few days later I was thanking my old doctor for having procured me such
a capital nurse, but he stared at me and said he knew nothing about the
woman.

I was puzzled, and asked my landlord if she could throw any light on the
strange nurse's identity; but she knew nothing, and her ignorance seemed
universal. I could not discover whence or how she came to attend me.

After my convalescence I took care to get all the letters which had been
awaiting me, and amongst them was a letter from my brother in Paris, in
answer to the epistle I wrote him from Perpignan. He acknowledged my
letter, and told me how delighted he had been to receive it, after
hearing the dreadful news that I had been assassinated on the borde