The King, looking into Kappel's face, into Kappel's clear story and the Warkotsch handwriting, needed only a few questions; and the fit orders, as to Warkotsch and Company, were soon given: dangerous engineers now fallen harmless, blown up by their own petard.

One of the King's first questions was: 'But how have I offended Warkotsch ?' Kappel does not know; Master is of strict wilful turn;--Master would grumble and growl sometimes about the peasant people, and how a nobleman has now no power over them, in comparison.

'Are you a Protestant ?' 'No, your Majesty, Catholic.' 'See, IHR HERREN,' said the King to those about him; 'Warkotsch is a Protestant; his Curatus Schmidt is a Catholic; and this man is a Catholic: there are villains and honest people in every creed!' "At noon, that day, Warkotsch had sat down to dinner, comfortably in his dressing-gown, nobody but the good Baroness there; when Rittmeister Rabenau suddenly descended on the Schloss and dining-room with dragoons: 'In arrest, Herr Baron; I am sorry you must go with me to Brieg!' Warkotsch, a strategic fellow, kept countenance to Wife and Rittmeister, in this sudden fall of the thunder-bolt: 'Yes, Herr Rittmeister; it is that mass of Corn I was to furnish [showing him an actual order of that kind], and I am behind my time with it! Nobody can help his luck.

Take a bit of dinner with us, anyway!' Rittmeister refused; but the Baroness too pressed him; he at length sat down.

Warkotsch went 'to dress;' first of all, to give orders about his best horse; but was shocked to find that the dragoons were a hundred, and that every outgate was beset.
Returning half-dressed, with an air of baffled hospitality: 'Herr Rittmeister, our Schloss must not be disgraced; here are your brave fellows waiting, and nothing of refreshment ready for them.