"
"Thereto I willingly agree," said the Teutonic knight. But to Ebbo
it was a shock that the pure, gentle Friedmund should thus be classed
with his treacherous assassin; and he had almost declared that it
would be sacrilege, when he received from the Emperor a look of
stern, surprised command, which reminded him that concession must not
be all on one side, and that he could not do Friedel a greater wrong
than to make him a cause of strife. So, though they half choked him,
he contrived to utter the words, "I consent."
"And in token of amity I here tear up and burn all the feuds of
Adlerstein," said Schlangenwald, producing from his pouch a
collection of hostile literature, beginning from a crumpled strip of
yellow parchment and ending with a coarse paper missive in the
clerkly hand of burgher-bred Hugh Sorel, and bearing the crooked
signatures of the last two Eberhards of Adlerstein--all with great
seals of the eagle shield appended to them. A similar collection--
which, with one or two other family defiances, and the letters of
investiture recently obtained at Ulm, formed the whole archives of
Adlerstein--had been prepared within Ebbo's reach; and each of the
two, taking up a dagger, made extensive gashes in these documents,
and then--with no mercy to the future antiquaries, who would have
gloated over them--the whole were hurled into the flames on the
hearth, where the odour they emitted, if not grateful to the physical
sense, should have been highly agreeable to the moral.
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