e Hague
on Monday night, in order, as they said, to betray their employers, whose
money they had taken, and whose criminal orders they had agreed to
execute, attempted to escape, but were arrested within ten days. They
were exhibited at their prison at Amsterdam to an immense concourse at a
shilling a peep, the sums thus collected being distributed to the poor.
Slatius made his way disguised as a boor into Friesland, and after
various adventures attempted to cross the Bourtange Moors to Lingen.
Stopping to refresh himself at a tavern near Koevorden, he found himself
in the tap-room in presence of Quartermaster Blau and a company of
soldiers from the garrison. The dark scowling boor, travel-stained and
weary, with felt hat slouched over his forbidding visage, fierce and
timorous at once like a hunted wild beast, excited their suspicion.
Seeing himself watched, he got up, paid his scot, and departed, leaving
his can of beer untasted. This decided the quartermaster, who accordingly
followed the peasant out of the house, and arrested him as a Spanish spy
on the watch for the train of specie which the soldiers were then
conveying into Koevorden Castle.

Slatius protested his innocence of any such design, and vehemently
besought the officer to release him, telling him as a reason for his
urgency and an explanation of his unprepossessing aspect--that he was an
oculist from Amsterdam, John Hermansen by name, that he had just
committed a homicide in that place, and was fleeing from justice.

The honest quartermaster saw no reason why a suspected spy should go free
because he proclaimed himself a murderer, nor why an oculist should
escape the penalties of homicide. "The more reason," he said, "why thou
shouldst be my prisoner." The ex-preacher was arrested and shut up in the
state prison at the Hague.

The famous engraver Visser executed a likeness on copper-plate of the
grim malefactor as he appeared in his boor's disguise. The portrait,
accompanied by a fiercely written broadsheet attacking the Remonstrant
Church, had a great circulation, and deepened the animosity against the
sect upon which the unfrocked preacher had sworn vengeance. His evil face
and fame thus became familiar to the public, while the term Hendrik Slaet
became a proverb at pot-houses, being held equivalent among tipplers to
shirking the bottle.

Korenwinder, the treasurer of the association, coming to visit
Stoutenburg soon after van Dyk had left him, was