ONE:I am also permitted, sire, said Sir Thomas, to add the Duchy of Limburg. It is a duchy of great wealth and resources, so valuable that the Elector Palatine was willing to give in exchange for it the whole Duchy of Berg.I was so little moved by it that I answered, going on with my work, Is that all? which greatly surprised them. A while82 after, my sisters and several ladies came to congratulate me. I was much loved, and I felt more delighted at the proofs each gave me of that than at what had occasioned their congratulations. In the evening I went to the queens. You may readily conceive her joy. On my first entrance she called me her dear Princess of Wales, and addressed Madam De Sonsfeld as Miladi. This latter took the liberty of hinting to her that it would be better to keep quiet; that the king, having yet given no notice of this business, might be provoked at such demonstration, and that the least trifle could still ruin all her hopes.
FORE:In the mean time the Austrians had turned in upon us a rivulet, and by midnight we found our horses in the water up to their bellies. We were really incapable of defending ourselves.
FORE:After this signal achievement his Prussian majesty established his army in winter quarters along the banks of the Elbe. He took up his abode in the palace of Dresden, awaiting the opening of the spring campaign. Saxony was held with a tight grasp, and taxes and recruits were gathered from the country as if it had always belonged to Prussia. Frederick had hoped that his sudden campaign would have led him into the heart of the Austrian states. Instead of this, though he had wrested Saxony from Poland, he had given Austria ample time to prepare her armies for a long war, and had roused all Europe to intense hostility against him.
FORE:The region through which this retreat and pursuit were conducted was much of the way along the southern slope of the Giant Mountains. It was a wild country of precipitous rocks, quagmires, and gloomy forests. At length Prince Charles, with his defeated and dispirited army, took refuge at K?nigsgraft, a compact town between the Elbe and the Adler, protected by one stream on the west, and by the other on the south. Here, in an impregnable position, he intrenched his troops. Frederick, finding them unassailable, encamped his forces in a position almost equally impregnable, a few miles west of the Elbe, in the vicinity of a little village called Chlum. Thus the two hostile armies, almost within sound of each others bugles, defiantly stood in battle array, each watching an opportunity to strike a blow.
