au_ containing twenty gold crowns, about the expenditure of
which he would come to an account with him when the affair was settled.
His presence in Dresden on the occasion of his liberation he prohibited
as unnecessary, nay, he gave the express order that he should remain in
the territory of Altenburg, as the temporary leader of the band, which
could not well do without a captain. When the messenger came towards
the evening he gave him this letter, and rewarding him liberally,
exhorted him to take the greatest care of it. His design was to
proceed to Hamburg with his five children, and there to embark for the
Levant or the East Indies, or as far as the sky might cover other men
than those he knew, for his soul, which was now bowed down with grief,
had given up the notion of getting the horses, to say nothing of his
repugnance to make a common cause with Nagelschmidt.

Scarcely had the fellow delivered this answer to the castellan than the
high chancellor was removed, the president, Count Kallheim, was
appointed chief of the tribunal in his stead, and Kohlhaas, being
arrested by a cabinet order of the elector, was thrown into the city
prison, heavily laden with chains. Proceedings were commenced against
him on the ground of the letter, which was posted up at all the corners
of the town; and when, before the bar of the tribunal, to the question
of the counsel, who presented him this letter, whether he recognised
the handwriting, he answered "Yes," but to the question whether he had
any thing to say in his defence, he with downcast eyes answered "No."
He was condemned to have his flesh torn with red-hot pincers, and his
body quartered and 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 hands of arbitrary power
and claimed him as a Brandenburg subject in the electoral chancery,
through a note sent for that purpose. For the brave Captain Heinrich
von Geusau had told him, during a walk on the banks of the Spree, the
history of this strange and not utterly abandoned man. On this
occasion, urged by the questions of the astonished elector, he could
not avoid mentioning the wrong which had been done to his own person,
through the improper acts of the high chancellor, Count Siegfried von
Kallheim. The elector, being highly indignant at this, demanded an
explanation of the high chancellor, and finding that his relation