uard, that his suit was proceeding quite according to
his wishes, and that he gave him up to the full vengeance of the laws
as a warning to the rabble around him for the incendiarisms he had
committed in the Erzgebirg, after the publication of the amnesty. At
the same time some fragments of the criminal proceedings, which the
horse-dealer had set on foot against the man at the Castle of Luetzen,
for the misdeeds above alluded to, were subjoined to enlighten the
people, as to the good-for-nothing fellow, who had been sentenced to
the gallows, and had only been saved by the elector's patent. The
prince, satisfied by these acts, calmed Kohlhaas, as to the suspicion
which they had been forced to express under the circumstances, assured
him that so long as he continued in Dresden, the amnesty granted him
should remain unbroken, once more shook hands with the boys, to whom he
gave the fruit that was on the table, and dismissed him. The
chancellor, who likewise perceived the danger that impended over the
horse-dealer, did his utmost to bring the affair to a conclusion before
it became entangled and complicated by new events. Strange to say, the
cunning knights desired and aimed at the same thing, and instead of
tacitly confessing the crime as before, and limiting the opposition to
a mitigation of the sentence, they now began with all sorts of
chicanery to deny the crime itself. Now they gave out that the horses
had merely been kept at the Tronkenburg by the act of the castellan and
the bailiff, of which the squire knew little or nothing; now they
asserted that the beasts were sick of a violent and dangerous cough
immediately after their arrival, appealing to witnesses whom they
promised to produce; and when they were beaten out of the field with
their arguments by inquiries and explanations, they brought an
electoral edict, in which twelve years before, on account of prevailing
distemper among cattle, the introduction of horses from Brandenburg
into Saxony was prohibited. This was to prove that the squire was not
only authorised but actually bound to detain the horses brought by
Kohlhaas over the border. Kohlhaas, who in the meanwhile had
repurchased his farm of the good farmer at Kohlhaasenbrueck for a small
sum, wished, as it appears, for the purpose of finally completing this
transaction, to leave Dresden for a few days, and to travel home;--a
resolution in which, however, we doubt not the alleged business,
important