put to
the rack to make them confess facts learned by them in the confessional.
They persistently refused to answer. Wenceslas, infuriated by their
obstinacy, himself seized a torch and applied it to their limbs to make
them speak. They were still silent. The affair ended in his ordering
John of Nepomuk to be flung headlong, during the night, from the great
bridge over the Moldau into the stream. A statue now marks the spot
where this act of tyranny was performed.

The final result of the emperor's cruelty was one which he could not
have foreseen. He had made a saint of Nepomuk. The church, appreciating
the courageous devotion of the murdered ecclesiastic to his duty in
keeping inviolate the secrets of the confessional, canonized him as a
martyr, and made him the patron saint of Bohemia.

Puchnik escaped with his life, and eventually with more than his life.
The tyrant's wrath was followed by remorse,--a feeling, apparently,
which rarely troubled his soul,--and he sought to atone for his cruelty
to one churchman by loading the other with benefits. But his mad fury
changed to as mad a benevolence, and he managed to make a jest of his
gratuity. Puchnik was led into the royal treasury, and the emperor
himself, thrusting his royal hands into his hoards of gold, filled the
pockets, and even the boots, of the late sufferer with the precious
coin. This done, Puchnik attempted to depart, but in vain. He found
himself nailed to the floor, so weighed down with gold that he was
unable to stir. Before he could move he had to disgorge much of his
new-gained wealth, a proceeding to which churchmen in that age do not
seem to have been greatly given. Doubtless the remorseful Wenceslas
beheld this process with a grim smile of royal humor on his lips.

The emperor had a brother, Sigismund by name, a man not of any high
degree of wisdom, but devoid of his wild and immoderate temper.
Brandenburg was his inheritance, though he had married the daughter of
the King of Hungary and Poland, and hoped to succeed to those countries.
There was a third brother, John, surnamed "Von Goerlitz." Sigismund was
by no means blind to his brother's folly, or to the ruin in which it
threatened to involve his family and his own future prospects. This last
exploit stirred him to action. Concerting with some other princes of the
empire, he suddenly seized Wenceslas, carried him to Austria, and
imprisoned him in the castle of Wiltberg, in that country.

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