’"What! a gentleman breaking open my trunk with hammer and chisel—­ impossible!”

’Herr von Potzdorff was returning to life by this time, with a swelling on his skull as big as a saucepan; and the officers carried him off, and the judge who was sent for dressed a proces verbal of the matter, and I demanded a copy of it, which I sent forthwith to my ambassador.

’I was kept a prisoner to my room the next day, and a judge, a general, and a host of lawyers, officers, and officials, were set upon me to bully, perplex, threaten, and cajole me.  I said it was true you had told me that you had been kidnapped into the service, that I thought you were released from it, and that I had you with the best recommendations.  I appealed to my Minister, who was bound to come to my aid; and, to make a long story short, poor Potzdorff is now on his way to Spandau; and his uncle, the elder Potzdorff, has brought me five hundred louis, with a humble request that I would leave Berlin forthwith, and hush up this painful matter.

’I shall be with you at the “Three Crowns” the day after you receive this.  Ask Mr. Lumpit to dinner.  Do not spare your money—­you are my son.  Everybody in Dresden knows your loving uncle,

‘The Chevalier de Balibari.’

And by these wonderful circumstances I was once more free again:  and I kept my resolution then made, never to fall more into the hands of any recruiter, and henceforth and for ever to be a gentleman.

With this sum of money, and a good run of luck which ensued presently, we were enabled to make no ungenteel figure.  My uncle speedily joined me at the inn at Dresden, where, under pretence of illness, I had kept quiet until his arrival; and, as the Chevalier de Balibari was in particular good odour at the Court of Dresden (having been an intimate acquaintance of the late monarch, the Elector, King of Poland, the most dissolute and agreeable of European princes), I was speedily in the very best society of the Saxon capital:  where I may say that my own person and manners, and the singularity of the adventures in which I had been a hero, made me especially welcome.  There was not a party of the nobility to which the two gentlemen of Balibari were not invited.  I had the honour of kissing hands and being graciously received at Court by the Elector, and I wrote home to my mother such a flaming description of my prosperity, that the good soul very nearly forgot her celestial welfare and her confessor, the Reverend Joshua Jowls, in order to come after me to Germany; but travelling was very difficult in those days, and so we were spared the arrival of the good lady.