plundered," and evidently the previous pages must have contained an
account of the breaking out of the Thirty Years' War in the island of
Usedom. It goes on as follows:--

"Coffers, chests, and closets were all plundered and broken to pieces,
and my surplice also was torn, so that I remained in great distress and
tribulation. But my poor little daughter they did not find, seeing that
I had hidden her in the stable, which was dark, without which I doubt
not they would have made my heart heavy indeed. The lewd dogs would even
have been rude to my old maid Ilse, a woman hard upon fifty, if an old
cornet had not forbidden them. Wherefore I gave thanks to my Maker when
the wild guests were gone, that I had first saved my child from their
clutches, although not one dust of flour, nor one grain of corn, one
morsel of meat even of a finger's length was left, and I knew not how I
should any longer support my own life, and my poor child's. _Item_, I
thanked God that I had likewise secured the _vasa sacra_, which I had
forthwith buried in the church in front of the altar, in presence of the
two churchwardens, Hinrich Seden and Claus Bulken, of Uekeritze,
commending them to the care of God. And now because, as I have already
said, I was suffering the pangs of hunger, I wrote to his lordship the
Sheriff Wittich V. Appelmann, at Pudgla, that for the love of God and
his holy Gospel he should send me that which his highness' grace
Philippus Julius had allowed me as _praestanda_ from the convent at
Pudgla, to wit, thirty bushels of barley and twenty-five marks of
silver, which, howbeit his lordship had always withheld from me hitherto
(for he was a very hard inhuman man, as he despised the holy Gospel and
the preaching of the Word, and openly, without shame, reviled the
servants of God, saying that they were useless feeders, and that Luther
had but half cleansed the pigstye of the Church--God mend it!). But he
answered me nothing, and I should have perished for want if Hinrich