all our hearts everything that had made us wroth. This
last greeting came as a fragrant love-posy, and it helped us to think of
Herdegen's long pilgrimage as he himself did--as of a ride forth to the
Forest. From this letter we were likewise aware that he had never known
what peril he had escaped; for ere long I learned from Kunz that paid
assassins had fallen on him the very next evening after Herdegen's
departing, in the crooked street called of Saint Chrysostom, at the back
part of the German Merchants' House; yea, and they would easily have
overpowered him but that certain great strong Tyrolese bale-packers of
the Fondaco came to his succor or ever it was too late. And it was right
certain that these murderers were in Giustiniani's pay, and in the dusk
had taken Kunz for his brother, who was some what like him. The younger
had come off unharmed by the special mercy of the Saints, but it might
well have befallen that, as of old in his schooldays, he should have
borne the penalty for Herdegen's misdoings. And whereas I mind me here
of the many ways in which my eldest brother prospered and got the best
of it over the younger, and of other like cases, meseems it is the lot
of certain few to suffer others, not their betters, to stand in their
sun, and eat the fruit that has ripened on their trees.

Howbeit, Herdegen had by good hap escaped a sharp fray; and when Ann and
I, kneeling side by side in Saint Laurence's church, had offered up a
thanksgiving from the bottom of our hearts, meseemed we were as some
Captain who sings Te Deum after a victory.

Yet, as ofttimes in the month of May, when for a while the sun bath
shone with summer heat and glory, there comes a gloomy time with dark
days and sharp frost at nights, so did we deem the long space which
followed after that glad and pious church-going. Days grew to weeks and
weeks to months and we had no tidings, no word from our pilgrims, for
good or for evil.

Verily it was well-nigh a comfort and a help when those who were on the
look-out, Kunz and other friends, gave it as certain tidings that the
galleon which was carrying Herdegen to Cyprus, and which belonged to
the Lomellini of Genoa, had been lost at sea. Saracen pirates, so it was
told, had seized the ship; but further tidings were not to be got, as
to what had befallen the crew and the travellers, albeit Kunz forthwith
betook himself to Genoa and the Futterers, who had a house and trade of
their own there, did