which had plunged him into misfortune, and that the castellan and the steward were to blame for everything, because they, without his knowledge or consent, had used the horses in getting in the crops and, by overworking them, partly in their own fields, had rendered them unfit for further use.  He sat down as he said this and begged them not to mortify and insult him and thus wantonly cause a relapse of the illness from which he had but recently recovered.

Since there was nothing else to be done, the next day, at the request of their cousin, the Squire, the lords Hinz and Kunz, who possessed estates in the neighborhood of Tronka Castle, which had been burned down, wrote to their stewards and to the farmers living there for information about the black horses which had been lost on that unfortunate day and not heard of since.  But on account of the complete destruction of the castle and the massacre of most of the inhabitants, all that they could learn was that a servant, driven by blows dealt with the flat of the incendiary’s sword, had rescued them from the burning shed in which they were standing, but that afterward, to the question where he should take them and what he should do with them, he had been answered by a kick from the savage madman.  The Squire’s gouty old housekeeper, who had fled to Meissen, assured the latter, in reply to his written inquiry, that on the morning after that horrible night the servant had gone off with the horses toward the Brandenburg border, but all inquiries which were made there proved vain, and some error seemed to lie at the bottom of this information, as the Squire had no servant whose home was in Brandenburg or even on the road thither.  Some men from Dresden, who had been in Wilsdruf a few days after the burning of Tronka Castle, declared that, at the time named, a groom had arrived in that place, leading two horses by the halter, and, as the animals were very sick and could go no further, he had left them in the cow-stable of a shepherd who had offered to restore them to good condition.  For a variety of reasons it seemed very probable that these were the black horses for which search was being made, but persons coming from Wilsdruf declared that the shepherd had already traded them off again, no one knew to whom; and a third rumor, the originator of which could not be discovered, even asserted that the two horses had in the mean time passed peacefully away and been buried in the carrion pit at Wilsdruf.

This turn of affairs, as can be easily understood, was the most pleasing to the lords Hinz and Kunz, as they were thus relieved of the necessity of fattening the blacks in their stables, the Squire, their cousin, no longer having any stables of his own.  They wished, however, for the sake of absolute security, to verify this circumstance.  Sir Wenzel Tronka, therefore, in his capacity as hereditary feudal lord with the right of judicature, addressed a letter to the magistrates at Wilsdruf, in which, after a minute