time the emperor's
ambassador at the court of London. From the house of this nobleman he
was traced into the service of Count d'Oberstorf, where he had married
his lady's chambermaid, and then gone to settle as a surgeon in Bohemia.

"In the course of these inquiries, several years elapsed: his uncle, who
was very much attached to the house of Austria, lived at Barcelona when
the father of this empress-queen resided in that city, and lent him a
very considerable sum of money in the most pressing emergency of his
affairs; and when that prince was on the point of returning to Germany,
the old count, finding his end approaching, sent his father confessor
to his majesty, with a circumstantial account of the barbarity he had
practised against his nephew, for which he implored forgiveness, and
begged he would give orders, that the orphan, when found, should inherit
the dignities and fortune which he had unjustly usurped.

"His majesty assured the old man, that he might make himself easy
on that score, and ordered the confessor to follow him to Vienna,
immediately after the count's death, in order to assist his endeavours
in finding out the injured heir. The priest did not fail to yield
obedience to this command. He informed himself of certain natural marks
on the young count's body, which were known to the nurse and women who
attended him in his infancy; and, with a gentleman whom the emperor
ordered to accompany him, set out for Bohemia, where he soon found the
object of his inquiry, in the capacity of major-domo to a nobleman
of that country, he having quitted his profession of surgery for that
office.

"He was not a little surprised, when he found himself circumstantially
catechised about the particulars of his life, by persons commissioned
for that purpose by the emperor. He told them, that he was absolutely
ignorant of his own birth, though he had been informed, during his
residence in Turkey, that he was the bastard of a Spanish grandee,
and gave them a minute detail of the pilgrimage he had undergone. This
information agreeing with the intelligence which the priest had already
received, and being corroborated by the marks upon his body, and the
very scars of the wounds which had been inflicted upon him in his
infancy, the confessor, without further hesitation, saluted him by
the name of Count d'Alvarez, grandee of Spain, and explained the whole
mystery of his fortune.

"If he was agreeably amazed at this explanatio