The death of Gustavus was the death of his great antagonist. Gustavus gone, Wallenstein was no longer indispensable, and he was far more formidable than ever. Lutzen had abated nothing either of his pride or power. He went forth again from Prague to resume command in almost imperial pomp. The army was completely in his hands. He negotiated as an independent power, and was carrying into effect a policy of his own, which seems to have been one of peace for the empire with amnesty and toleration, and which certainly crossed the policy of the Jesuits and Spain, now dominant in the Imperial councils. No doubt the great adventurer also intended that his own grandeur should be augmented and secured. Whether his proceedings gave his master just cause for alarm remains a mystery. The word, however, went forth against him, and in Austrian fashion, a friendly correspondence being kept up with him when he had been secretly deposed and his command transferred to another. Finding himself denounced and outlawed, he resolved to throw himself on the Swedes. He had arrived at Eger, a frontier fortress of Bohemia. It was a night apt for crime, dark and stormy, when Gordon, a Scotch Calvinist, in the Imperial service (for Wallenstein's camp welcomed adventurers of all creeds), and commandant of Eger, received the most faithful of Wallenstein's officers, Terzka, Kinsky, Illo and Neumann, at supper in the citadel. The social meal was over, the wine cup was going round; misgiving, if any misgiving there was, had yielded to comradeship and good cheer, when the door opened and death, in the shape of a party of Irish troopers, stalked in. The conspirators sprang from the side of their victims, and shouting, "Long live the Emperor," ranged themselves with drawn swords against the wall, while the assassins overturned the table and did their work. Wallenstein, as usual, was not at the banquet. He was, indeed, in no condition for revelry. Gout had shattered his stately form, reduced his bold handwriting to a feeble scrawl, probably shaken his powerful mind, though it could rally itself, as at Lutzen, for a decisive hour; and, perhaps, if his enemies could have waited, the course of nature might have spared them the very high price which they paid for his blood. He had just dismissed his astrologer, Seni, into whose mouth the romance of history does not fail to put prophetic warnings, his valet was carrying away the golden salver, on which his night draught had been brought to him, and he was about to lie down, when he was drawn to the window by the noise of Butler's regiment surrounding his quarters, and by the shrieks of the Countesses Terzka and Kinsky, who were wailing for their murdered husbands. A moment afterwards the Irish Captain Devereux burst into the room, followed by his fellow-assassins shouting, "Rebels, rebels!" Devereux himself, with a halbert in his hand, rushed up to Wallenstein, and cried, "Villain,