Now, no one can take it ill, if in telling an amusing tale I have no wish to mix up horrible stories with it, and so I shall not say more than necessary touching the French Chasseur. I shall say nothing about how he felt when he got to Brandenburg, or how he was brought before the Court-martial, and nothing about how the anguish of death came nearer and nearer, until he met the fate his evil deeds had brought upon him. And I could not do so, even if I wished; for I only write of what I know and _this_ I don't know. I have never in my life hardened myself so far as to be able to look on a poor sinner led out for the last time, and to see how one sinner, by warrant of a human court, sends another sinner, before his time to the Tribunal of the Almighty. But let me say shortly that it happened; it was so.--And when his bleeding body lay on the sand, probably no one thought that the bullets would strike much deeper in another heart, far away in France. I mean his old mother's. I will therefore only say that, through the Frenchman's being given up safe and sound, the Miller and the Baker were acquitted of the murder; and that, through his confession and through the evidence of Inspector Bräsig and the valet-de-chambre, the Landrath von Uertzen came to his own again; and the Colonel von Toll, when the Judge was going to keep back the money, as unclaimed property, got up, and said severely, that his regiment should not be branded with robbing and thieving. And so saying he took the valise and said to Luth:-- "You seem a sensible man; take this sealed valise and give it to the Herr Amtshauptmann Weber; he is to do with it what is right according to the practice of the country." Luth received a paper with it, and thus the matter was settled. But now there arose a difficulty which no one had thought of before:--what was to be done with my uncle Herse. When the Miller and the baker and all the others had gone out of the court and away from him, my uncle remained there, like a fine old oak which the forester has left in a clearing, alone in its grandeur. The Colonel looked at him and asked: "Why are you still here?" My uncle Herse stirred his branches as it were, and from the look in his dusky-red face, it was clear that a storm of wind was beginning to agitate the head of the old tree: "That's what I was going to ask you," was his answer.