had heard yesterday, and ended with the great and cruel price demanded by
the Sultan, she shrieked aloud and clasped her hands to her heart in such
wise that I was verily in great fear. Then the elecampane wine did good
service; yet was it not till she had drunk of it many times that her
tongue spoke plainly again. And presently, when she was able to wag it,
it went on for a long time with no pause nor rest, in sheer impatience
and godless railing.

When she had thus relieved her mind, she began pacing up and down the
floor on one and the same plank, like a lion in its cage, and to call to
mind, one by one, all our earthly possessions, and to reckon at how we
might attain to selling it for gold. The whole sum was not much to
comfort us, for her worldly estate, like that of the Waldstromers, was in
land, and in these days of peril from the Hussites it was hard enough to
sell landed property, and her best portion was in meads and pasture and a
few vineyards near Wurzburg.

It was from the first her fixed intent, as though it were a matter of
course, to give everything she had, down to her jewels; and whereas she
conceived, and rightly, that for Herdegen's sake I should be like-minded,
she asked me no questions but added to it in her mind, the Schopper
jewels which had come to me from my father and mother, and then began to
count and reckon. It might perchance come to so much as eleven thousand
sequins if we sold all we had to sell; yet our inheritance lay in
Chancery, and, as she knew full well, not a farthing thereof might be
given up but with the full and well-proven authority of Herdegen and
Kunz. Nor might I even have that which was mine own, by reason that our
inheritance had never been shared, and our houses and lands had not been
valued at a price. Thus I must have long patience or ever I came by my
own; all the more so whereas the gentlemen of the Chancery were required