“God forbid!” said the man, “it was on account of a rascally piece of injustice. For in the evening, the horses of two knights, who had come to the Tronkenburg, were put in the stable, and mine were tied to the stable-door. And when I took the horses out of the hand of the castellan, and asked him where they were to be kept, he showed me a pigsty, built with boards and laths against the castle wall.” “You mean,” interrupted Kohlhaas, “that it was such a bad place for horses, that it was more like a pigsty than a stable.” “I mean a pigsty, master,” said Herse, “really and truly a pigsty, where the pigs ran in and out, and in which I could not stand upright.” “Perhaps there was no other place for the horses,” observed Kohlhaas, “and those of the knights had, in some measure, the preference.” “The place,” answered the servant, dropping his voice, “was indeed narrow. Seven knights in all were stopping at the castle; but if it had been you--you would have put the horses a little closer together. I said that I would try to hire a stable in the village, but the castellan objected that he must have the horses under his own eye, and that I must not venture to move them from the yard.” “Hem!” said Kohlhaas, “what did you do then?” “Why, as the bailiff told me that the two guests would only stop over the night, and would leave the next morning, I led the horses into the sty. But the next day passed, and nothing of the kind took place; and when the third came, I heard the visitors would remain at the castle for some weeks.” “Then, in the end,” said Kohlhaas, “it was not so bad in the pigsty, as it seemed, when first you looked into it.” “True,” replied Herse, “when I had swept the place a bit, it was passable. Then I gave the girl a groschen to put the pigs somewhere else, and during the day, at least, I managed to let the horses stand upright, for I took off the boards at the top, when the morning dawned, and put them on again in the evening. They peeped out of the roof like so many geese, and looked after Kohlhaasenbrück, or some place at any rate, where they would be better off.” “But now,” said Kohlhaas, “why in the world did they send you away?” “Because, master,” replied the man, “they wanted to get rid of me; because, as long as I was there, they could not ruin the horses. In the yard, and in the servants’ room, they always made queer faces at me, and because I thought ‘you may twist your mouths out of joint, if you like,’ they managed to find a pretext, and turned me out of the yard.” “But the reason,” said Kohlhaas, “they must have had some reason.”