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I was now thinking in German at least so it seems to me when I look back upon that night and I answered without reflecting. "I don't care where it is as long as I can get somewhere to sleep out of this infernal rain!" "The gentleman can have a good, clean bed at the Hotel Sixt in the little street they call the Vos in't Tuintje, on the canal behind the Bourse.

In the long and anguishing weeks that followed on that anxious night in the Hotel of the Vos in't Tuintje, I have often wondered to what malicious promptings, to what insane impulse, I owed the idea that suddenly germinated in my brain as I sat fingering the dead man's letter-case in that squalid room.

Semlin, with, as the sole safeguard against exposure, should I fall in with the dead man's employers or friends, that slight and possibly imaginative resemblance between him and me: I had to take such measures as would prevent the fraud from being detected when the body was discovered in the hotel: above all, I had to ascertain, before I could definitely resolve to push on into Germany, whether Semlin was already known to the people at the hotel or whether as I surmised to be the case this was also his first visit to the house in the Vos in't Tuintje.

In a flash I saw before me again that scene in the squalid bedroom in the Vos in't Tuintje the candle guttering in the draught, the livid corpse on the floor and that sinister woman crying out: "Der Stelze has power, he has authority, he can make and unmake men!" The mind has unaccountable lapses. The phrase had slipped out of my German vocabulary.