had fled.  He felt especially troubled about a rich nunnery for ladies of rank, Erlabrunn by name, which was situated on the shores of the Mulde, and whose abbess, Antonia Tronka, was celebrated in the neighborhood as a pious, charitable, and saintly woman.  The unhappy Kohlhaas thought it only too probable that the Squire, stripped as he was of all necessities, had taken refuge in this nunnery, since the abbess was his own aunt and had been his governess in his early childhood.  After informing himself of these particulars, Kohlhaas ascended the tower of the castellan’s quarters in the interior of which there was still a habitable room, and there he drew up a so-called “Kohlhaas mandate” in which he warned the country not to offer assistance to Squire Wenzel Tronka, against whom he was waging just warfare, and, furthermore, commanded every inhabitant, instead, relatives and friends not excepted, to surrender him under penalty of death and the inevitable burning down of everything that might be called property.

This declaration he scattered broadcast in the surrounding country through travelers and strangers; he even went so far as to give Waldmann, his servant, a copy of it, with definite instructions to carry it to Erlabrunn and place it in the hands of Lady Antonia.  Thereupon he had a talk with some of the servants of Tronka Castle who were dissatisfied with the Squire and, attracted by the prospect of plunder, wished to enter the horse-dealer’s service.  He armed them after the manner of foot-soldiers, with cross-bows and daggers, taught them how to mount behind the men on horseback, and after he had turned into money everything that the company had collected and had distributed it among them, he spent some hours in the gateway of the castle, resting after his sorry labor.

Toward midday Herse came and confirmed what Kohlhaas’ heart, which was always filled with the most gloomy forebodings, had already told him—­namely, that the Squire was then in the nunnery of Erlabrunn with the old Lady Antonia Tronka, his aunt.  It seemed that, through a door in the rear wall behind the castle, leading into the open air, he had escaped down a narrow stone stairway which, protected by a little roof, ran down to a few boats on the Elbe.  At least, Herse reported that at midnight the Squire in a skiff without rudder or oars had arrived at a village on the Elbe, to the great astonishment of the inhabitants who were assembled on account of the fire at Tronka Castle and that he had gone on toward Erlabrunn in a village cart.

Kohlhaas sighed deeply at this news; he asked whether the horses had been fed, and when they answered “Yes,” he had his men mount, and in three hours’ time he was at the gates of Erlabrunn.  Amid the rumbling of a distant storm on the horizon, he and his troop entered the courtyard of the convent with torches which they had lighted before reaching the spot.  Just as Waldmann, his servant, came forward to announce