Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/761

Rh away, saying, "You shall die before you go away from Nuremberg!" Caspar recognized in this man the same person who had taken him out of the cellar, and who doubtless wished to punish him for having broken silence and told his story to the gossiping burgomaster. Nobody but Caspar had seen this black man, who seemed to have vanished in the air like smoke, after having struck the youth. Search was instituted for him, and inquisitions were made to recover traces of him; but no news was had of him. From that day, however, due pains were taken to protect the child of Europe against the assassins who were watching for him; and he never went out without an escort of two guards.

These precautions were relaxed little by little, and some time after this Caspar left Nuremberg and went to reside at Anspach, under the care and at the expense of Count Stanhope. He became a boarding-pupil of schoolmaster Meyer, whom he caused much annoyance. On the 14th of December, 1833, as he was walking alone in the Public Garden, he was again accosted by a black man, who presented him with a purse; and he was at the same time struck on his left side with a dagger. The purse contained a note written in a back hand, and reading: "Hauser will be able to describe my appearance to you, and tell you where I came from. To save him the trouble, I will tell you myself: I came from the frontier of Bavaria. I will tell you my name, too: M. L. O." The second assassin was as indiscoverable as the other one. Unfortunately, the wound was graver than was thought at first, and Caspar died on the 17th of December, having exclaimed, "O God, God! must I die thus in shame and disgrace?"

There was at the time in Berlin a counselor of police named Merker, a very methodical, exact, logical man, whose sagacity it was hard to outwit. Struck with the accumulation of improbabilities in the stories of Caspar Hauser, he drew the conclusion from them that "either we must believe in miracles, or Caspar is an impostor." "It will be said some day, in some course of universal history," he wrote, "that a young man appeared one evening in a German city as if he had fallen from a star; but the sky was not his country; he had come out of an underground dungeon, and saw daylight now for the first time. A mysterious unknown had brought him out of his hole, and this unknown was at the same time his jailer, his master, his tutor, his deliverer, and the man commissioned to assassinate him. The police of the city of Nuremberg found something queer in this story, and regarded the miraculous child as a very ordinary vagabond. But the world soon became occupied with him. They wrote books and a great many articles in the journals about him. The extraordinary being became the object of profound scientific researches. His saliva, his urine, his evacuations were learnedly analyzed; his ways of acting, even his sneezings, were studied and commented upon as if they were affairs of state. If any one ventured to express a doubt, he was dishonored and