“Her parents had been poor people, earning an honest livelihood, who brought up their children respectably. They thought a great deal of their Ursula, who always took a high place in school. Her intelligence and her beauty, however, were to prove her curse. She went into domestic service with a rich Jewish family, where the son of the house seduced her and, when the consequences of the intrigue could no longer be concealed, she was dismissed ignominiously. She moved to Nürnberg, where she took to disreputable ways, and she always had plenty of money until her beauty began to wane. Then she gradually sank lower and lower in the social scale, and finally became addicted to thieving, which landed her continually in prison. “I observed my penitent closely, but saw no reason to doubt or mistrust her. I now and then made use of a text on Sunday to inveigh against hypocrisy, but she continued to play the part of the crushed and contrite Magdalen and asked permission to take down my sermon on her slate. To this I could not, of course, object. I would sometimes look at the slate and compare it with my manuscript and seldom found a word wrong. What might not this woman have become had she been born in a higher sphere? When her term of solitary confinement had expired, she requested that it might be extended over her full time, and remained for two years longer in her cell. By and by she became a prison nurse, and not only tended the sick with kindness and devotion but also with uncommon skill. Her conduct was exemplary to the last, and when she finally departed, it was with many protestations of gratitude and the most heartfelt assurances of reform. “Yet a few months later, Ursula Pfeiffer’s papers were asked for by some other penal institution. She had soon fallen back into evil ways, and was sentenced to a fresh imprisonment. I was convinced that my first impression of her as a hypocrite and a dissembler was absolutely correct.” The Reverend Otto Fleischmann’s experience will be borne out by hundreds of other God-fearing, philanthropic ministers who have devoted themselves to the care and possible regeneration of criminals. Two sensational crimes committed in our own day, and which made a great stir in Germany, were much commented on in the journals of the time. One was the murder of a boy of five years old at Xanten in Prussian Rhineland. The trial took place at the provincial court of justice at Kleve, and the hall used was part of the ancient castle of the dukes of Kleve, around which the legend of the “Knights of the Swan” (Lohengrin) still lingers. The case excited widespread interest. The man accused was a Jew and the fiercest passions caused by religious hatred were engendered. Excesses were committed in the town; the case became a subject of heated dispute in the popular assemblies, and more than once occupied the attention of the Prussian Chamber of Deputies.