go to Hamburg with his five children and
there to take ship for the Levant, the East Indies, or the most
distant land where the blue sky stretched above people other than
those he knew. For his heart, bowed down by grief, had renounced the
hope of ever seeing the black horses fattened, even apart from the
reluctance that he felt in making common cause with Nagelschmidt to
that end.

Hardly had the fellow delivered this answer of the horse-dealer's to
the Governor of the Palace when the Lord High Chancellor was deposed,
the President, Count Kallheim, was appointed Chief Justice of the
Tribunal in his stead, and Kohlhaas was arrested by a special order of
the Elector, heavily loaded with chains, and thrown into the city
tower. He was brought to trial upon the basis of this letter, which
was posted at every street-corner of the city. When a councilor held
it up before Kohlhaas at the bar of the Tribunal and asked whether he
acknowledged the handwriting, he answered, "Yes;" but to the question
as to whether he had anything to say in his defense, he looked down at
the ground and replied, "No." He was therefore condemned to be
tortured with red-hot pincers by knacker's men, to be drawn and
quartered, and his body to be burned between the wheel and the
gallows.

Thus stood matters with poor Kohlhaas in Dresden when the Elector of
Brandenburg appeared to rescue him from the clutches of arbitrary,
superior power, and, in a note laid before the Chancery of State in
Dresden, claimed him as a subject of Brandenburg. For the honest City
Governor, Sir Heinrich von Geusau, during a walk on the banks of the
Spree, had acquainted the Elector with the story of this strange and
irreprehensible man, on which occasion, pressed by the questions of
the astonished sovereign, he could not avoid mentioning the blame
which lay heavy upon the latter's own person through the unwarranted
actions of his Arch-Chancellor, Count Siegfried von Kallheim. The
Elector was extremely indignant about the matter and after he had
called the Arch-Chancellor to account and found that the relationship
which he bore to the house of the Tronkas was to blame for it all, he
deposed Count Kallheim at once, with more than one token of his
displeasure, and appointed Sir Heinrich von Geusau to be
Arch-Chancellor in his stead.

Now it so happened that, just at that time, the King of Poland, being
at odds with the House of Saxony, for what occasion we do not know,
appr