bastions, the brook
and the valley--only one thing it brightened not, the heart of the young
wife.

CHAPTER VII

THE CAVERN OF LUCSIA

Not so very long ago there was in Transylvania a wide-spreading society
of coiners which, it is now notorious, had carried on its nefarious
business undetected for more than half a century. The science was an
inheritance descending from father to son, people married and were born
into it. Careful parents trained their children to follow it, and a very
lucrative profession it proved to be. That it should have remained
undiscovered for so long a time, that it should have been plied
successfully for more than fifty years under the very noses of the
authorities--all this was capable of a very simple explanation, _these
men coined gold pieces_.

Yes, genuine ducats, of full weight, out of real three-and-twenty carat
gold, without any admixture of baser metal, so that they absolutely
could not be distinguished from the royal ducats of the authorized
minting towns, Koermoecz and Gyulafehervar. If they fell into the hands of
a goldsmith, and he melted them, he found that they did not contain half
a grain more silver than the genuine ones. Indeed the public lost
nothing by their fabrication, though the state treasury suffered
considerably.

The whole region, in fact, from Zalathna to Verespatak abounded in that
precious metal which some fool or other has called "a mere chimera," and
the gold mining was farmed out to private individuals, the yearly output
from the shafts being twelve hundredweights. These private diggers are
bound to deliver the gold they obtain to the minting towns at Abradbanya
or Gyulafehervar and there receive coined money in exchange.
Nevertheless, during some fifty years, only about six hundredweights
were delivered annually at these places; the rest disappeared, though at
first nobody could suspect it. The State pays to the diggers 441 guldens
for every pound of gold dust, which quantity when coined is worth 720
guldens. But it occurred to the mountaineers that they also might
profitably engage in coining and circulate the money so coined. So they
provided themselves with all the necessary implements and machinery
(there were skilled workmen among them) and issued false ducats to their
very great advantage. Their existence was not even suspected except by
the parties interested in the concern, and they had every motive in the
world for preserving the secret.