ritory again. Saxon
Officials followed him into Brandenburg territory; snapt him back into
Saxon; tried him by Saxon law there;--Saxon law, express in such case,
condemns him to be hanged; and that is his doom accordingly.

"Captain Natzmer to swing on the gallows? Taken on Brandenburg territory
too, and not the least notice given me?" Friedrich Wilhelm blazes into
flaming whirlwind; sends an Official Gentleman, one Katsch, to his
Excellenz Baron von Suhm (the Crown-Prince's cultivated friend), with
this appalling message: "If Natzmer be hanged, for certain I will use
reprisals; you yourself shall swing!" Whereupon Suhm, in panic, fled
over the marches to his Master; who bullied him for his pusillanimous
terrors; and applied to Friedrich Wilhelm, in fine frenzy of indignant
astonishment, "What, in Heaven's name, such meditated outrage on the law
of nations, and flat insult to the Majesty of Kings, can have meant?"
Friedrich Wilhelm, the first fury being spent, sees that he is quite out
of square; disavows the reprisals upon Suhm. "Message misdelivered by my
Official Gentleman, that stupid Katsch; never did intend to hang Suhm;
oh, no;" with much other correspondence; [In Mauvillon (ii. 189-195)
more of it than any one will read.]--and is very angry at himself, and
at the Natzmer affair, which has brought him into this bad pass. Into
open impropriety; into danger of an utter rupture, had King August
been of quarrelsome turn. But King August was not quarrelsome; and then
Seckendorf and the Tobacco-Parliament,--on the Kaiser's score, who wants
Pragmatic Sanction and much else out of these two Kings, and can at no
rate have them quarrel in the present juncture,--were eager to quench
the fire. King August let Natzmer go; Suhm returned to his post;
[Pollnitz, ii. 254.] and things hustled themselves into some uneasy
posture of silence again;--uneasy to the sensitive fancy of Friedrich
Wilhelm above all. This is his worst collision with his Neighbor of
Saxony; and springing from one's Hobby again!--

These sorrows, the death of George I., with anxieties as to George II.
and the course he might take; all this, it was thought, preyed upon his
Majesty's spirits;--Wilhelmina says it was "the frequent carousals with
Seckendorf," and an affair chiefly of the royal digestive-apparatus.
Like enough;--or both might combine. It is certain his Majesty fell into
one of his hypochondrias at this time; talked of "abdicating" and other
gloom