manner to receive two crowns which were due to him on account of the sheep he had stolen.  After being associated with the band as their chief, he went to buy a piece of linen, but thinking, from the situation of the premises, that it might be obtained without any exchange of coin on his part, he returned the same evening, and stealing a ladder in the neighbourhood, placed it at a window of the warehouse, and got in.  A man was writing in the interior, but the robber looked at him steadily, and shouldering his booty, withdrew.  He was taken a second time, but escaped as before on the same night.

His third escape was from a dark and damp vault in the prison of Schneppenbach, where, having succeeded in penetrating to the kitchen, he tore an iron bar from the window by main force, and leaped out at hazard.  He broke his leg in the fall, but finding a stick, managed to drag himself along, in the course of three nights, to Birkenmuhl, without a morsel of food, but on the contrary, having left some ounces of skin and flesh of his own on the road.

Marianne Schoeffer was the first avowed mistress of Schinderhannes.  She was a young girl of fourteen, of ravishing beauty, and always “se mettait avec une elegance extreme.”  Blacken Klos, one of the band, an unsuccessful suitor of the lady, one day, after meeting with a repulse, out of revenge carried off her clothes.  When the outrage was communicated to Schinderhannes, he followed the ruffian to a cave where he had concealed himself, and slew him.  It was Julia Blaesius, however, who became the permanent companion of the young chief.  The account given by her of the manner in which she was united to the destiny of the robber is altogether improbable.  A person came to her, she said, and mentioned that somebody wished to speak to her in the forest of Dolbach; she kept the assignation, and found there a handsome young man who told her that she must follow him—­an invitation which she was obliged at length by threats to accede to.  It appears sufficiently evident, however, that the personal attractions of Schinderhannes, who was then not twenty-two, had been sufficient of themselves to tempt poor Julia to her fate, and that of her own accord

  “She fled to the forest to hear a love tale.”

It may be, indeed, as she affirmed, that she was at first ignorant of the profession of her mysterious lover, who might address her somewhat in the words of the Scottish free-booter—­

  “A lightsome eye, a soldier’s mien—­
  A bonnet of the blue,
  A doublet of the Lincoln green,
  ’Twas all of me you knew.”

But it is known that afterwards she even accompanied him personally in some of his adventures dressed in men’s clothes.