y the commissioners of the
Trenck estate.'"

"'BARON FREDERICK VON TRENCK.'"

"And Trenck wrote this note himself?" said the king.

"If your majesty is acquainted with Trenck's handwriting, you will
perhaps have the goodness to examine it yourself."

"I know his handwriting; give me the paper."

He took the paper and glanced over it searchingly. "It is his
handwriting," he murmured; "but I will examine it again."

Speaking thus, he stepped hastily to his escritoire, and took from a
small box several closely written yellow papers, and compared them with
the document which Weingarten had given him.

Ah, how little did Trenck dream, as he wrote those letters, that they
would witness against him, and stamp him as a criminal! They were
already a crime in the king's eyes, for they were tender letters that
Trenck had dared to write from Vienna to the Princess Amelia. They had
never reached her!

And not those tender epistles of a tearful and unhappy love must bear
witness against the writer, and condemn him for the second time!

"It is his handwriting," said the king, as he laid the letters again
in the box. "I thank you, Baron Weingarten, you have saved me from a
disagreeable occurrence, for, if I will not even believe that Trenck
intended murder, he was at all events willing to create a scene, if only
to gratify his vanity. It appears that he has now played out his role
at Vienna, as well as in St. Petersburg and Berlin, and the world would
forget him if he did not attract its attention by some mad piece of
folly. How he intended to accomplish this I do not know, but certainly
not by a murder--no, I cannot believe that!"

"Your majesty is always noble and magnanimous, but it appears to me that
these words can have but one meaning. 'I shall go to Konigsberg,' writes
Baron Trenck, 'and there do in the presence of the king what no one has
done before me, and what no one will do after me.' Does not this make
his intention pretty clear?"

"Only for those who know his intentions or suspect them, for others they
could have any other signification, some romantic threat, nothing more.
Baron Trenck is a known adventurer, a species of Don Quixote, always
fighting against windmills, and believing that warriors and kings honor
him so far as to be his enemies. I punished Trenck when he was in my
service, for insubordination; now he is no longer in my service, and
I have forgotten him, but woe be unto him if he forces me to re