according to his wishes, he should now expose his honour to the censure of the world, and appear with a request for indulgence before a man, who had brought all imaginable shame upon him and his family. The elector having read through the letter, asked Count Kallheim, with some confusion, whether the tribunal would not be justified in taking its ground with Kohlhaas on the circumstance that the horses could not be restored, and then in decreeing a mere compensation in money as if they were dead. The count replied, “Gracious sir, they are dead!--dead in the legal sense of the word, because they have no value, and they will be physically dead before they can be removed from the flayer’s yard to the knight’s stables.” Upon this the elector putting up the letter, said that he would speak about it to the chancellor, consoled the chamberlain, who arose in his bed and thankfully seized his hand, and after he had told him to take every care of his health, rose very graciously from his chair, and took his leave. Thus stood matters in Dresden, while another storm still more formidable was gathering over poor Kohlhaas from Lützen, and the spiteful knights had tact enough to draw down its flashes upon his unlucky head. John Nagelschmidt, one of the men collected by Kohlhaas, and dismissed after the appearance of the amnesty, had thought fit a few weeks afterwards to assemble anew a portion of the rabble who were disposed for any outrage, and to carry on the trade into which Kohlhaas had initiated him on his own account. This worthless fellow, partly to frighten the officers by whom he was pursued, partly to induce the peasantry after the ordinary fashion to take part in his misdeeds, called himself vicegerent to Kohlhaas, and spread a report with the cunning he had learned from his master, that the amnesty had not been kept with many men, who had returned quietly to their homes--nay that Kohlhaas himself, by a shameful violation of faith, had been imprisoned immediately on his arrival at Dresden, and had been consigned to the care of a guard. In placards, quite similar to those of Kohlhaas, he made his band of incendiaries appear as a warlike force, raised solely for the honour of God, with the mission of seeing that the amnesty granted by the elector was properly carried out. The whole affair, as we have already said, had nothing to do with the honour of God, nor with any attachment to Kohlhaas, about whose fate the fellow was totally indifferent, but he merely intended under the protection of devices to burn and plunder with greater impunity. The knights, as soon as the news of this occurrence reached Dresden, could scarcely conceal their joy at the entirely new turn which it gave to the whole affair. With sagacious and dissatisfied side-glances they alluded to the mistake that had been made in granting Kohlhaas the amnesty in spite of all their warnings, just as if for the sake of encouraging rascals of every kind to follow in his steps.