himself as a distinguished lord or soldier, and caused the burden to be conveyed by the trooper's horses or his servants. Sometimes the mint-master was obliged to travel to the frontier to meet the agent, under the pretext of paying a visit to some friend. Then the costly goods were carried far from the dwellings of men, across lonely heaths, or through the clearings of a wood, from one hand to another, on a merchant's parole. Meanwhile the petty Jewish dealer carried at night, along byways over the frontier, his wallet full of old groschen, in the twofold fear of robbers and of the guardians of the law. The wallet, the broad-brimmed hat, and the yellow cloth border to the coat, the mark of a Jew of the Empire, was frequently seen at the mint. There existed between the dealer and the mint-master a confidential business connection, certainly not without a mental reservation; for it occasionally happened to the Jew that false thalers were found in one of the hundred marks which he delivered in thalers, or that the wallet together with the coin had become moist during the journey, which added some half-ounces to their weight, or that fine white sand became mingled with the granulated silver, and was weighed with it. For this the mint-master indemnified himself, by hanging the scales so that one side of the beam was shorter than the other, by causing the scales to spring up and descend slowly, notwithstanding the perpendicular position of the balance, in order to make the wares some half-ounces lighter, or by falsifying the weights altogether. What the masters did not do, the apprentices of the mint ventured upon. However cautious the purveyor might be during the smelting assay, they understood how to mix copper dust with the silver already weighed, in order to make the assay worse than it really was. Such was the state of the traffic even at those mints where there was still some respect for the law.