Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 7.djvu/98

 78 NOTES AND QUERIES. 112 s..vii. JULY 24, 10201 and Stephanie de Beauharnais. He also asserted that Kaspar was born three months after her marriage to the Grand Duke of Baden. Readers of contemporary French records will recollect that there were " ugly " rumours of Napoleon and Stephanie in cir- culation some years previously. The MS. was submitted to my father who told Vogel that the subject was of no interest to English readers, that the French had quite enough (and to spare) of Beauharnais-Bonaparte scandals just after the Franco -German war, and that its publication would never be permitted in Germany. My father often told me that when he first came to England in 1859 there was quite a batch of French- men and Rhine province Germans living in Soho who claimed to be natural sons of Napoleon, and he was sick and tired of hearing and listening to their " romances." Some of the Frenchmen received financial assistance from members of the Bonapartist family, but the Rhine " offsprings " of Napoleon were not so successful. ANDREW DE TEBNANT. 30, Somerleyton Road, Brixton, S.W. The Encyclopaedia Britannica gives a good account and bibliography of this legend. Andrew Lang in his ' Historical Mysteries ' (1904) analyses the evidence with results unfavourable to the "romantic " version of the story, and inclines to regard Kaspar as simply a humbug. ARCHIBALD SPARKE. " The fable about a Prince of Baden had not a single shred of evidence in its favour." So says Andrew Lang, who discussed the mystery of Kaspar Hauser sixth among his ' Historical Mysteries.' JOHN B. W AINE WRIGHT. Lord Stanhope, grandfather of the present Earl, wrote exhaustively on the subject. CONSTANCE RUSSELL. KIPLING: REFERENCE WANTED (12 S. vii. 49). J. R. H. will find that the sen- tence, " There are not many happinesses so complete as those that are snatched under the shadow of the sword," is taken from a short story, ' Without benefit of Clergy,' first published 1891 (Macmillan & Co.). The book is ' Life's Handicap.' In Northern India stood a monastery called " The Chubara of Dhunni Bhagat," where " Gobind-the-one-eyed " rested his arm on his short-handled crutch and waited for death. He is supposed to have given Kipling the above story and at the same time extracted 1 a promise that "in the forepart of the book- preceding everything else that it shall be written Gobind, sadhu, of the island in the river and awaiting God in Dunni Bhagat's- Chubara, first spoke of this book." Mr. Kipling will, I hope, forgive me suggesting that he did not wish us to take- this quotation J. R. H. inquires for too* seriously, and that possibly this is one of Gobind' s maxims and stories already so handsomely acknowledged in the preface of the book. HERBERT DOWSON. St. Stephen's Gardens, Richmond. UNCOLLECTED KIPLING ITEMS : QUAT- RAIN ON G. W. STEEVENS (12 S. vi. 178). Captain Firebrace may like to know that my collection contains the following, cut, I imagine, from an American or Canadian iiewspaper in 1900. Unfortunately, my cutting has neither the name of the paper" from which it was taken, nor the date, but it would appear to be a quotation frora The Daily Mail at the end of March 1900 : KIPLING'S IDEA OF STEEVENS. " London, March 26th. A Bloemfontein corre- spondent of The Daily Mail, telegraphing" Saturday, says that Rudyard Kipling, who is hard at work assisting to edit the newspaper, Friend, conducted by the war correspondents, has contributed to it the following four lines on- the death at Ladysmith of G. W. Steevens, the famous representative of The Daily Mail : Through war and pestilence, red siege and fire, Silent and self-contained he drew his breath. Brave not for show of courage ; his desire Truth, as he saw it, even to the death." J. R. H. ROYAL OAK DAY (12 S. vi. 293, 316, 339 ;.- vii. 15). In the county of Durham in the last half of last century, a holiday on the after- noon of May 29, of each school year was a general thing in country districts. If a new master refused to acknowledge the old custom he was generally greeted with the old school chant : The Twenty-Ninth of May, Its Royal Oak Day ; If ye diddent give us halliday We'll all run away. And they either carried out the same, or " barred " him out. When the County Council took over the schools, this ancient custom (which had existed in some country schools since 1750 at least) was done away with. J. W. FAWCETT. Templetown House, Consett.