on."

Ferdinand could not help owning the sanity of his observations, and
forthwith acquiesced in his proposal of the new alliance; desiring to
know the character in which he acted on the English stage, and the scheme
he would offer for their mutual emolument. At the same time he resolved
within himself to keep such a strict eye over his future actions, as
would frustrate any design he might hereafter harbour, of repeating the
prank he had so successfully played upon him, in their journey from the
banks of the Rhine.

"Having quitted you at Bar-le-duc," resumed the Tyrolese, "I travelled
without ceasing, until I arrived at Frankfort upon the Maine, where I
assumed the character of a French chevalier, and struck some masterly
strokes, which you yourself would not have deemed unworthy of your
invention; and my success was the more agreeable, as my operations were
chiefly carried on against the enemies of our religion. But my
prosperity was not of long duration. Seeing they could not foil me at my
own weapons, they formed a damned conspiracy, by which I not only lost
all the fruits of my industry, but likewise ran the most imminent hazard
of my life. I had ordered some of those jewels which I had borrowed of
my good friend Fathom to be new set in a fashionable taste, and soon
after had an opportunity to sell one of these, at a great advantage, to
one of the fraternity, who offered an extraordinary price for the stone,
on purpose to effect my ruin. In less than four-and-twenty hours after
this bargain, I was arrested by the officers of justice upon the oath of
the purchaser, who undertook to prove me guilty of a fraud, in selling a
Saxon pebble for a real diamond; and this accusation was actually true;
for the change had been artfully put upon me by the jeweller, who was
himself engaged in the conspiracy.

"Had my conscience been clear of any other impeachment, perhaps I should
have rested my cause upon the equity and protection of the law; but I
foresaw that the trial would introduce an inquiry, to which I was not at
all ambitious of submitting, and therefore was fain to compromise the
affair, at the price of almost my whole fortune. Yet this accommodation
was not made so secretly, but that my character was blasted, and my
credit overthrown; so that I was fain to relinquish my occasional
equipage, and hire myself as journeyman to a lapidary, an employment
which I had exercised in my youth. In this obscure station,