Now the devil is a thorough-going sort of a person, and having planted the evil wish in Gottlieb's soul he lost no time in opening to him an evil way to its accomplishment. When Hans, a stranger in New York, had come to work at the Cafe Nuernberg, Gottlieb had commended him to the good graces of a friend of his, a highly respectable little round Brunswicker widow who let lodgings, and in the comfortable quarters thus provided for him Hans ever since had remained. In this same house lodged also one of Gottlieb's apprentices--a loose young fellow, for whose proper regulation the widow more than once had been compelled to seek his master's counsel and aid. In this combination of circumstances, to which the devil now directed his attention, Gottlieb saw his opportunity. It was easy to make the widow believe that the loose young apprentice had taken the short step from looseness to crime, and that a suspicion of theft rested upon him so heavily as to justify the searching of his room; it was easy to make the widow keep guard 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.