THE CAVERN OF LUCSIA Not so very long ago there was in Transylvania a wide-spreading society of coiners which, it is now notorious, had carried on its nefarious business undetected for more than half a century.

The science was an inheritance descending from father to son, people married and were born into it.

Careful parents trained their children to follow it, and a very lucrative profession it proved to be.

That it should have remained undiscovered for so long a time, that it should have been plied successfully for more than fifty years under the very noses of the authorities--all this was capable of a very simple explanation, _these men coined gold pieces_.
Yes, genuine ducats, of full weight, out of real three-and-twenty carat gold, without any admixture of baser metal, so that they absolutely could not be distinguished from the royal ducats of the authorized minting towns, Koermoecz and Gyulafehervar.

If they fell into the hands of a goldsmith, and he melted them, he found that they did not contain half a grain more silver than the genuine ones.