Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/758

734 was hardly worth while to give so much labor and matter to the proving Caspar Hauser to be an impostor, Herr von der Linde's volumes will interest those who would like to know how legends are started, how they spread, and how they impose themselves on gossips, to whom the wonderful is the more charming as it is less probable.

On the 26th of May, 1828, there appeared in Nuremberg a stout, short boy, sixteen or eighteen years old, of rustic appearance, having light-chestnut hair, gray eyes, and a downy beginning of beard, and wearing a large felt hat, a jacket of dark-gray cloth, with breeches of the same, blue stockings, and hob-nailed half-boots. He had a letter without signature, addressed to Herr Friedrich von Wessenig, major in the sixth light cavalry, which read: "I send you a youth who wishes to serve, like his father, in the light-horse. He was put into my charge by his mother on the 7th of October, 1812. I am a poor day's worker, with a family to take care of. I have brought the boy up in the Christian religion, and have never let him go away from my house, so that not a soul in the world knows where he has lived till now. Do not question him on this subject, for he can not tell you anything. To keep him more in the dark, I brought him as far as Neumark in the night. He has not a sou. If you don't want to keep him, kill him, or hang him up by the chimney." This letter inclosed another one, which was regarded as of sixteen years' earlier date, on paper of similar character, and apparently in the same hand. It read in substance: "The child has been baptized, and his name is Caspar. When he is seventeen years old, send him to Nuremberg, to the light cavalry regiment. He was born on the 30th of April, 1812. I am a poor girl and can not support him, and his father is dead."

Herr von Wessenig questioned the youth, but he could not tell who he was or where he had come from. Such prodigious ignorance appeared suspicious to the major, and he sent the letters to the police commissioner, asking his advice about them. The police at first regarded Caspar as a vagabond, and he was locked up. Three points seemed to be established: that he was born on the 30th of April, 1812; that he was the illegitimate son of a poor girl and a light-cavalry man; and, as his dialect indicated, that he was a native of some part of Bavaria, near the borders of Bohemia. More than this, he had something to conceal: he had probably committed some offense, which he did not care about acknowledging to the police, and was trying to cover up his tracks. When he saw that, instead of his being enrolled in the cavalry, they were taking him to prison, he made himself appear still more simple-minded and silly than before. If they had taken a sensible course in the matter, Herr von der Linde justly observes, they could soon have cleared up the mystery; "but they did not think of looking upon the ground, and gazed into the clouds."