"Sir, sir," said the little man, his pendent chin shaking like the wattle of a turkey-cock, "this levity ill beseems you. You are aware that we have a traitor in our midst, a viper warmed in our bosom; you have even now come from speech with him. I pray the villain has confessed his sins." "Why no, Mynheer," I said smoothly, "the villain is impenitent, and professes that he has done nought save in love and loyalty to the city. Surely the good repute of his family might dispose you, sirs, to hesitate before you condemn him unheard." "His family, his family!" stuttered the Burgomaster, whom I perceived to be in his most exalted and arrogant mood. "Hold, sir; peruse this epistle, and say then whether he be not deserving of the extreme penalty." The letter came to me by the hands of the six or seven councillors that sat between me and the Burgomaster, of whom some scowled, some glared, some looked compassionately upon me. I took the paper and cast an eye upon it, and immediately I understood that Jan Verhoeff was in even worse case than I had supposed. ’Twas a very brief epistle, with no superscription nor any signature at the end, written not by any man within the city, but by an enemy without. It warned the nameless receiver that the customary messenger having been slain, by Dutch peasants as ’twas thought, and his dispatch stolen, the last message had not come to the general’s hand; but the writer opined that the city could not endure many days longer, and urged the receiver to employ all his arts upon he knew whom, and furthermore to certify that person that when by his good offices the city should be delivered up, his goods should be spared to him, with a share of the general booty. "Sir," said the Burgomaster, when I had read the letter, "you behold a manifest proof of the traitor’s villainy. He sends word of our hapless state to the enemy; he employs cunning machinations upon some ill-affected person in our city; he is sowing treason in our good field." I made bold to say that there was no proof of the letter having been intended for Mynheer Verhoeff, whereupon he bade me look upon the cover, and when I did so I perceived, very faintly inscribed there, the letters J.V.