The sun had now set; the eastern and western skies were glowing with the most splendid hues as the van rolled through the town-gate, rattled up two or three narrow, badly-paved streets, and stopped at last at a gateway in a high dead-wall. The gate slowly opened, the van rolled across a wide yard shut in on all sides with lofty blank walls and tall, gloomy-looking buildings, to the gate of the tallest and most forbidding of these, and there stopped. I had reached the place where I was to spend seven years because I had endeavored to guard my friend and protector from the results of a crime which I myself abhorred. Seven years! I was determined that it should not be so long. I had read the adventures of Baron Trenck, and knew that it was possible to pierce thick masonry and undermine great fortress-walls. What he had succeeded in doing, I thought I could not fail to accomplish. So my first proceeding, when the door closed behind the surly warden, was to examine my cell as closely as the faint remains of daylight would allow. If all the prisoners were so well lodged, there were certainly many of them that fared much worse when at liberty. The walls of the small room were simply whitewashed, it is true; but so were those of my garret at home. There was an iron bedstead with what seemed a very comfortable bed, a clothes-press, at the solitary window a large table with a drawer, two wooden chairs, and, to my surprise, a great arm-chair covered with leather, which strongly reminded me of the one in my room at Castle Zehrendorf. Yes, I was again the guest of a Zehren, though this time he was only the superintendent of a prison. It seemed as if the Zehrens were inextricably woven into my life. They had brought me but little good fortune; and the proud lustre that had formerly seemed to me to illume the name, had greatly paled in my eyes. The steuerrath, in whom the boy had beheld the incarnation of the highest earthly authority, what was he in the eyes of the prisoner but a liar and hypocrite who had ten-fold and a hundred-fold deserved the misfortunes he had brought upon men who were better than he? And the man here, who, sprung from such a family, had been willing to undertake such an office as his, must be even worse than the hypocrite and liar. I would let him feel the full measure of my contempt when I met him; I would tell him that if he chose to be a jailor, he ought at least to renounce the name which his noble brother had borne, who preferred dying by his own hand to falling into the hands of those who would have brought him here, behind this triply-bolted door, and these windows with massive bars of iron.