-six.

His cousin Frederick is the Trenck who here tells a story of himself that
abounds in lively illustration of the days of Frederick the Great. He
professes that Frederick the King owed him a grudge, because Frederick
the Trenck had, when eighteen years old, fascinated the Princess Amalie
at a ball. But as Frederick the Greater was in correspondence with his
cousin Franz at the time when that redoubtable personage was planning the
seizure of Frederick the Great, there may have been better ground for the
Trenck's arrest than he allows us to imagine. Mr. Carlyle shows that
Frederick von der Trenck had been three months in prison, and was still
in prison, at the time of the battle of the Sohr, in which he professes
to have been engaged. Frederick von der Trenck, after his release from
imprisonment in 1763, married a burgomaster's daughter, and went into
business as a wine merchant. Then he became adventurous again. His
adventures, published in German in 1786-7, and in his own French version
in 1788, formed one of the most popular books of its time. Seven plays
were founded on them, and ladies in Paris wore their bonnets a la Trenck.
But the French finally guillotined the author, when within a year of
threescore and ten, on the 26th of July, 1794. He had gone to Paris in
1792, and joined there in the strife of parties. At the guillotine he
struggled with the executioner.

H.M.

CHAPTER I.

I was born at Konigsberg in Prussia, February 16, 1726, of one of the
most ancient families of the country. My father, who was lord of Great
Scharlach, Schakulack, and Meichen, and major-general of cavalry, died in
1740, after receiving eighteen wounds in the Prussian service. My mother
was daughter of the president of the high court at Konigsberg. After my
father's death she married Count Lostange, lieutenant-colonel in the Kiow
regiment of cuirassiers, with whom she went and resided at Breslau. I
had two brothers and a sister; my youngest brother was taken by my mother
into Silesia; the other was a cornet in this last-named regiment of Kiow;
and my sister was married to the only son of the aged General Valdow.

My ancestors are famous in the Chronicles of the North, among the ancient
Teutonic knights, who conquered Courland, Prussia, and Livonia.

By temperament I was choleric, and addicted to pleasure and dissipation;
my tutors found this last defect most difficult to overcome; happily,
they were aided by