"Can you ride then?" "What?" "I ask, can you ride?" Mamsell Westphalen now got up, set her arms a-kimbo and said: "What respectable woman ever rides? I have known one female in my life who did; she was a young lady, and the rest of her conduct was of a piece with it." Rathsherr Herse now also got up, and walked once or twice up and down the kitchen, lost in thought, and at last asked--"Do you think you could sit for twenty-four hours in the town peat-bog?" "But, Herr Rathsherr," said Mamsell Westphalen, and put her apron up to her eyes again and wiped away the tears, "I'm now over fifty, and I had my great illness last autumn and...." "Then that won't do either," broke in the Rathsherr. "There are only two ways left, one upstairs, the other down below. Fly you must, either on to the roof or into the cellar." "Herr Rathsherr," cried Fritz Sahlmann, and he crept from behind the stove, "I know a place." "What _you_ here!" exclaimed Rathsherr Herse. "Yes," said Fritz quite abashed. "Well then it's all over again with secrecy, for what three know, the whole world knows." "I promise faithfully I won't tell, Herr Rathsherr," said Fritz. "And, Mamsell, I know a capital place. There's a plank loose in the garret where you hang your hams and sausages to smoke, and, if you make yourself small, you can squeeze through, and behind there by the chimney there's a little place where you can hide and no one would ever find you." "You young scoundrel," said Mamsell Westphalen, forgetting all her sorrows and woes, "then it's you who are always stealing the sausages from up there; and, Herr Rathsherr, I have always suspected the innocent rats." My uncle, having threatened Fritz Sahlmann with a sound thrashing, said it was now high time and they must fly, and it would be the very place. So they all set off up to the garret, and when Fritz Sahlmann had shown them the loose plank and the hiding-place, my uncle Herse said-- "Well, Mamsell, now sit down on the floor. There's no help for it. I will lock the door of the garret; and if you hear anyone coming, creep softly into the hole, and mind you don't sneeze or cough." "You may well say that, Herr Rathsherr--in this smoke," she replied. "Oh, we will soon manage that," said he, and opened the dormer window. They were going away when she said, "Fritz, my lad, don't forsake me; and bring me word how things are going on." "Under no circumstances must he come up here," said the Rathsherr, "he might be seen, and then everything would be discovered." "Leave it to me, Mamsell," said Fritz, and made her a side wink, "I'll manage it." They went; and Mamsell Westphalen sat alone in her sadness under her flitches of bacon and hams and sausages. "Of what use are all these blessings," she said to herself, "when a person of my years has to take to flight."