urt. So it was read aloud, and Hans Teufel's
motion to let it drop without any action met with no approval, warmly as
I supported it.

"We must not blame the gentlemen. They all wish to act for your benefit,
and desire nothing except a clear understanding of this vexatious
business. But in that indictment Biberli was charged with having forced
his way into an Honourable's house at night to obtain admittance for
his master. In collusion with a maid-servant he was also said to have
maintained the love correspondence between Herr Ernst Ortlieb's two
daughters, a Swiss knight, and Boemund Altrosen."

"Infamous!" cried Eva. "What, in the name of all the saints, have we to
do with Altrosen?"

"You certainly have very little," replied Frau Christine, "but the
Ortlieb mansion has all the more. To-night he will again be seen before
its door, and if still later he appears with his lute under Countess
Cordula's windows and is heard singing to her, it wouldn't surprise me."

"And people," exclaimed Eva with increasing indignation, "will add
another link to the chain of slander. If a Vorkler and her companions
repeat the calumny, who can wonder? But that the magistrates
should believe such shameful things about the brothers of their own
fellow-member----"

"It was precisely because they do not believe it and wish to keep you
away from the court," her uncle interrupted, "that they insisted upon
the examination. They desired to show the people by their verdict and
the severity of the procedures how thoroughly in earnest they were.
But whilst I was compelled to absent myself an hour because the Emperor
wished to inspect the new towers on the city wall, and I had to attend
him in the character of showman, they sentenced the poor fellow, since
his loose tongue had brought the whole rout and rabble against him, to
torture so severe that I shuddered when told of it."

"And Biberli?" asked Eva, trembling with suspense.

"All honour is due the man!" cried Herr Berthold, raising his cap. "The
rods scourged his fettered limbs, his thumbs were pressed in the screws,
bound to the ladder, he was dragged over the larded hare---"

"Oh, hush!" cried Fran Christine with uplifted hands, and her husband
nodded understandingly. Then, with a faint sigh, he added:

"Why should I torture you with these horrors? Nothing was spared him.
Yet the worthy fellow stuck to his statement that he had accompanied his
master to your house in the full moonlig