that the mandate had been duly delivered, Kohlhaas saw the abbess and the chapter-warden step out under the portal of the nunnery, engaged in agitated conversation.  While the chapter-warden, a little old man with snow-white hair, shooting furious glances at Kohlhaas, was having his armor put on and, in a bold voice, called to the men-servants surrounding him to ring the storm-bell, the abbess, white as a sheet, and holding the silver image of the Crucified One in her hand, descended the sloping driveway and, with all her nuns, flung herself down before Kohlhaas’ horse.

Herse and Sternbald overpowered the chapter-warden, who had no sword in his hand, and led him off as a prisoner among the horses, while Kohlhaas asked the abbess where Squire Wenzel Tronka was.  She unfastened from her girdle a large ring of keys, and answered, “In Wittenberg, Kohlhaas, worthy man!”—­adding, in a shaking voice, “Fear God, and do no wrong!” Kohlhaas, plunged back into the hell of unsatisfied thirst for revenge, wheeled his horse and was about to cry, “Set fire to the buildings!” when a terrific thunder-bolt struck close beside him.  Turning his horse around again toward the abbess he asked her whether she had received his mandate.  The lady answered in a weak, scarcely audible voice—­“Just a few moments ago!” “When?” “Two hours after the Squire, my nephew, had taken his departure, as truly as God is my help!” When Waldmann, the groom, to whom Kohlhaas turned with a lowering glance, stammered out a confirmation of this fact, saying that the waters of the Mulde, swollen by the rain, had prevented his arriving until a few moments ago, Kohlhaas came to his senses.  A sudden, terrible downpour of rain, sweeping across the pavement of the courtyard and extinguishing the torches, relaxed the tension of the unhappy man’s grief; doffing his hat curtly to the abbess, he wheeled his horse, dug in his spurs, calling “Follow me, my brothers; the Squire is in Wittenberg,” and left the nunnery.

The night having set in, he stopped at an inn on the highroad, and had to rest here for a day because the horses were so exhausted.  As he clearly saw that with a troop of ten men (for his company numbered that many now) he could not defy a place like Wittenberg, he drew up a second mandate, in which, after a short account of what had happened to him in the land, he summoned “every good Christian,” as he expressed it, to whom he “solemnly promised bounty-money and other perquisites of war, to take up his quarrel against Squire Tronka as the common enemy of all Christians.”  In another mandate which appeared shortly after this he called himself “a free gentleman of the Empire and of the World, subject only to God”—­an example of morbid and misplaced fanaticism which, nevertheless, with the sound of his money and the prospect of plunder, procured him a crowd of recruits from among the rabble, whom the peace with Poland had deprived of a livelihood.  In fact, he had thirty-odd men when he crossed back to the right side of the Elbe, bent upon reducing Wittenberg to ashes.