"Now did my trouble begin again. After maturely reflecting upon the matter, I could think of no means whereby I might learn the lineage and circumstances of the maiden, whom I always looked upon as a noble person, for I did not deem it expedient to open myself to any one. Meanwhile, I met one day, Herr Tobias Pirner, the pastor at Nickelstadt, a pious, honourable, and upright man, although of the Lutheran confession. Now as I knew that the wife of General Schlepusch, whose husband had lately died and been buried with great pomp in the church at Liegnitz, went every Sunday, together with the maiden, to attend divine service in the Lutheran church at Nickelstadt, I begged of this Herr Pirner, in a way that made it in no wise remarkable on my part, to inquire concerning the lineage and other circumstances of the Mistress Mercer. He undertook this, and promised me the following week a report thereupon. Herr Pirner faithfully fulfilled his engagement, and at the end of the week reported to me in _optima forma_, what he had learnt from the _Frau Generalin_. Mistress Mercer was the daughter of Mr. Balthaser Mercer, formerly parliamentary assessor at Edinburgh, in Scotland, who had many times been sent to England by King Charles I. on weighty commissions, and once on a mission to Hamburg, where he was decorated with a golden medal of honour. Her mother, also called Elizabeth, was of noble lineage, born a Kennewy of Scotland. When in 1644 perilous troubles broke forth in England, her honoured father and also her brother, the court preacher Robert Mercer, as they had been favourites of the decapitated King, fled the kingdom with the whole family, from fear of Cromwell and his party; he went with all belonging to him to Bremen, where he lived on his own means, which were pretty considerable, till his happy end in 1650, leaving his widow, a pious, godly matron, with three sons and three daughters. The sons had gone forth into the world, one to India, another to the Canary Islands; of the daughters the eldest was married in London to a nephew of Cromwell, of the noble family of Cleipold, and the youngest to a merchant named Uckermann at Wanfried in Hess, the second was my love. In the year 1660 her lady mother also died in Bremen, and was laid beside her honoured father in the church of St. Stephen, after which Mistress Elizabeth had lived for a while with the widow of Herr Doctor Schnellen. Meanwhile she became acquainted with the _Frau_ Schlepusch, who lived at her property Schönbeck, near Bremen, and when soon after, the General Schlepusch and his wife departed for Silesia, they took her with them as a playfellow for their young daughter, to Klein-Polewitz, where she was always held in good esteem.