Besides Rauschmaier, his sweetheart and the other lodger, Josef Steiner, had been involved as suspects in the cross-examination. The woman’s guilt consisted only in her having assisted in selling the stolen goods, and she came off with a trifling punishment. Steiner’s connection with the principal crime was looked upon in a different light and was more complicated. This man caused much perplexity to the judge. In point of education and intelligence he was far inferior to his late room-mate. He could not be sworn because, although thirty-four years of age, he could not be brought to understand the nature and meaning of an oath. The judge declared that Steiner was on the borderland of insanity and on the lowest level of intelligence. When interrogated, he at first denied any knowledge of the crime, but later he practically became a witness for the prosecution and his evidence helped materially to secure conviction. Steiner himself was acquitted. At Mannheim, on March 23, 1819, August von Kotzebue, the eminent German playwright, author of the famous play _The Stranger_, was stabbed to death by a hitherto unknown student named Karl Ludwig Sand. It was a murder of sentiment, not passion, and inflicted with cold-blooded calmness, to vindicate the liberal tendencies of the age exhibited by the so-called “Burschenshaft” movement, which Kotzebue had unsparingly ridiculed and satirised by his writings. Immense sympathy for the criminal was evoked in Germany; the heinous deed was approved by even the right-thinking, phlegmatic Germans, and tender-hearted women wept in pity for the assassin. His last resting place was decked with flowers, and he was esteemed a martyr to the cause of romanticism, while no one regretted the great dramatic poet. As a youth, Sand suffered much from depression of spirits and pronounced melancholia. He was a patriot even to fanaticism, and showed it in his fierce hatred of the Napoleon who had enslaved his country. He could not bring himself to attend a review of French troops by Napoleon, lest he should attack him and so risk his own life. After the return from Elba, he entered the Bavarian service and narrowly escaped being present at the battle of Waterloo. At the end of the war he matriculated at the university of Erlangen and became affiliated with the “universal German students’ association,” the Burschenshaft, to which he vowed the most enthusiastic devotion. “It became,” says a biographer, “his one and all, his state, his church, his beloved.”