ssion. The woman,
on the promise of a considerable reward, part of which the chamberlain,
at her request, was forced to give beforehand, at once undertook to
perform the required office; and as the mother of the man, Herse, who
had fallen at Muehlberg, sometimes visited Kohlhaas, with the permission
of the government, and this woman had been acquainted with her for some
months, she succeeded in visiting Kohlhaas at an early day, with the
help of a small present to the gaoler.

Kohlhaas, as soon as she entered, thought that by the seal-ring, which
she wore on her finger, and the coral chain which hung from her neck,
he recognised the old gipsy who had given him the can at Jueterboch.
Indeed, as probability is not always on the side of truth, so was it
here; for something happened which we certainly record, but which every
one who chooses is at liberty to doubt. The fact is, the chamberlain
had committed the most monstrous blunder, the old woman whom he had
picked up in the streets of Berlin to imitate the gipsy, being no other
than the mysterious gipsy herself whom he wished to be imitated. The
woman leaning on her crutches, and patting the cheeks of the children,
who, struck by her strange aspect, clung to their father, told him that
she had for some time left Saxony for Brandenburg, and in consequence
of a heedless question asked by the chamberlain in the streets of
Berlin, about the gipsy who was in Jueterboch in the spring of the past
year, had at once hurried to him, and under a false name had offered
herself for the office which he wished to see fulfilled.

The horse-dealer remarked a singular likeness between this woman and
his deceased wife Lisbeth: indeed he could almost have asked her if she
were not her grandmother; for not only did her features, her hands,
which, bony as they were, were still beautiful, and especially the use
which she made of these while talking, remind him of Lisbeth most
forcibly, but even a mole by which his wife's neck was marked, was on
the gipsy's neck also.

Hence, amid strangely conflicting thoughts, he compelled her to take a
seat, and asked her what possible business of the chamberlain's could
bring her to him.

The woman, while Kohlhaas's old dog went sniffing about her knees, and
wagged his tail while she patted him, announced that the commission
which the chamberlain had given her, was to tell him how the paper
contained a mysterious answer to three questions of the utmos