uard below
while Gottlieb searched; and it was very easy then to search, not for
imaginary stolen goods in the chest of the apprentice, but for that
which he himself wanted to steal from the chest of Hans Kuhn. As to
opening the chest there was no difficulty at all. Gottlieb had half
a dozen Nuernberg locks in his house, and he had counted, as the event
proved correctly, upon making the key of one of these locks serve his
turn. And in the chest, without any trouble at all, he found a leather
wallet, and in the wallet the precious recipe--written on parchment
in old High German that he found very difficult to read, and dated
in Nuernberg in the year 1603. Gottlieb was pale as death as he went
down-stairs to the widow; and his teeth fairly chattered as he told her
that he had made a mistake. He tried to say that the apprentice was not
a thief--but the word _dieb_ somehow stuck in his throat. Keen chills
penetrated him as he almost ran through the streets to his home. For the
devil, who heretofore had been in front of him and had only beckoned,
now was behind him and was driving him with a right goodwill.

When he entered the room at the back of the shop, where Minna was
sewing, and where Herr Sohnstein, with his arm comfortably around Aunt
Hedwig's waist, was smoking his long pipe, he created a stir of genuine
alarm. As Aunt Hedwig very truly said, he looked as though he had seen
a ghost. Herr Sohnstein, of a more practical turn of mind, asked him if
he had been knocked down and robbed; and the word _beraubt_ grated most
harshly upon Gottlieb's ears. But what cut him most of all was the way
in which Minna--forgetting all his late unkind-ness at sight of his
pale, frightened face--sprang to him with open arms, and with all the
old love in her voice asked him to tell her what had gone wrong. Under
these favoring conditions, Gottlieb's good angel bestirred himself
somewhat more vigorously, and for a moment it seemed not impossible that
right might triumph over wrong. But the devil bustled promptly upon the
scene, and of course had things all his own way again in a moment. It
certainly is most unfortunate that good angels, as a rule, are so weak
in their angelic knees!

Gottlieb pushed Minna away from him roughly; addressed to Aunt Hedwig
the impolite remark that ghosts only were seen by women and fools; in a
surly tone informed Herr Sohnstein that policemen still were plentiful
in the vicinity of Tompkins Square; and then,