unlawfully detained
and spoiled. His relations, the brothers von Tronka, (the chamberlain
and the cupbearer,) at whose house he put up, received him with the
greatest indignation and contempt; they called him a wretched and
worthless person, who brought disgrace on all his family, told him that
he would infallibly lose the cause, and bade him prepare to bring the
horses, which he would be condemned to feed, amid the general derision
of the world. The squire, with a weak trembling voice, said that he
was more to be pitied than any one in the world. He swore that he knew
but little of the whole cursed business, which had plunged him into
calamity, and that the castellan and the bailiff were alone to blame,
inasmuch as they had employed the horses in the harvest without the
remotest knowledge and wish on his part, and had ruined them by
immoderate work in their corn fields. He sat down as he uttered these
words, and entreated his relations not to plunge him back again into
the illness from which he had recovered, by their reproaches. On the
following day, the brothers von Tronka, who possessed property in the
neighbourhood of the destroyed Tronkenburg, finding there was nothing
else to be done, wrote to their farmers and bailiffs, at their
kinsman's request, to obtain information respecting the horses, which
had disappeared on the day of the calamity and had not been heard of
since. But the whole place having been laid waste, and nearly all the
inhabitants having been slaughtered, they could learn no more than that
a servant, driven by blows with the flat of the incendiary's sabre, had
saved the horses from the burning shed, in which they stood, and that
on asking where he was to take them, and what he was to do, he only
received from the ruffian a kick for an answer. The gouty old
housekeeper, who had fled to Misnia, stated, in writing, that the
servant on the morning that followed that dreadful night had gone with
the horses to the Brandenburg border.

Nevertheless all inquiries made in that direction proved fruitless,
and, indeed, the intelligence did not appear correct, as the squire had
no servant whose house was in Brandenburg or even on the road thither.
Men from Dresden, who had been at Wilsdruf a few days after the
conflagration of the Tronkenburg, said that about the time specified a
boy had come there leading two horses by a halter, and that he had left
the animals, as they were in a very wretched plight