to her
forthwith that I was a bachelor, having no wife. During this discourse,
my sexton as well as my housekeeper were present, and to them, as to
myself, the demeanour of the maiden had always given the greatest
contentment, yet they did not fathom my intent.

"Now did my trouble begin again. After maturely reflecting upon the
matter, I could think of no means whereby I might learn the lineage and
circumstances of the maiden, whom I always looked upon as a noble
person, for I did not deem it expedient to open myself to any one.
Meanwhile, I met one day, Herr Tobias Pirner, the pastor at
Nickelstadt, a pious, honourable, and upright man, although of the
Lutheran confession. Now as I knew that the wife of General Schlepusch,
whose husband had lately died and been buried with great pomp in the
church at Liegnitz, went every Sunday, together with the maiden, to
attend divine service in the Lutheran church at Nickelstadt, I begged
of this Herr Pirner, in a way that made it in no wise remarkable on my
part, to inquire concerning the lineage and other circumstances of the
Mistress Mercer. He undertook this, and promised me the following week
a report thereupon. Herr Pirner faithfully fulfilled his engagement,
and at the end of the week reported to me in _optima forma_, what he
had learnt from the _Frau Generalin_. Mistress Mercer was the daughter
of Mr. Balthaser Mercer, formerly parliamentary assessor at Edinburgh,
in Scotland, who had many times been sent to England by King Charles I.
on weighty commissions, and once on a mission to Hamburg, where he was
decorated with a golden medal of honour. Her mother, also called
Elizabeth, was of noble lineage, born a Kennewy of Scotland. When in
1644 perilous troubles broke forth in England, her honoured father and
also her brother, the court preacher Robert Mercer, as they had been
favourites of the decapitated King, fled the kingdom with the whole
family, from fear of Cromwell and his party; he went with all belonging
to him to Bremen, where he lived on his own means, which were pretty
considerable, till his happy end in 1650, leaving his widow, a pious,
godly matron, with three sons and three daughters. The sons had gone
forth into the world, one to India, another to the Canary Islands; of
the daughters the eldest was married in London to a nephew of Cromwell,
of the noble family of Cleipold, and the youngest to a merchant named
Uckermann at Wanfried in Hess, the second was my l