; he may have 'given it a sword and a cocked hat,' as was Sir
Walter's wont. About Kaspar Hauser's mystery we can hardly speak of 'the
truth,' for the exact truth will never be known. The depositions of the
earliest witnesses were not taken at once; some witnesses altered their
evidence in later years; parts of the records of Nuremberg are lost in
suspicious circumstances. The Duchess of Cleveland's book, _Kaspar
Hauser_, is written in defence of her father, Lord Stanhope. The charges
against Lord Stanhope, that he aided in, or connived at, the slaying of
Kaspar, because Kaspar was the true heir of the House of Baden--are as
childish as they are wicked. But the Duchess hardly allows for the
difficulties in which we find ourselves if we regard Kaspar as
absolutely and throughout an impostor. This, however, is not the place
to discuss an historical mystery; this 'true story' is told as a romance
founded on fact; the hypothesis that Kaspar was a son and heir of the
house of Baden seems, to the editor, to be absolutely devoid of
evidence.

To Madame Von Platt Stuart the author owes permission to quote the
striking adventures of her father, or of her uncle, on the flooded
Findhorn. The _Lays of the Deer Forest_, which contain this tale in the
volume of notes, were written by John Sobieski Stuart, and by Charles
Edward Stuart, and the editor is uncertain as to which of those
gentlemen was the hero of these perilous crossings of the Highland
river. Many other good tales, legends, and studies of natural history
and of Highland manners may be found in the _Lays of the Deer Forest_,
apart from the curious interest of the poems. On the whole, with certain
exceptions, the editor has tried to find true stories rather out of the
beaten paths of history; the narrative of John Tanner, for instance, is
probably true, but the book in which his adventures were published is
now rather difficult to procure. For 'A Boy among the Red Indians,' 'Two
Cricket Matches,' 'The Spartan Three Hundred,' 'The Finding of Vineland
the Good,' and 'The Escapes of Lord Pitsligo,' the editor is himself
responsible, as far as they do not consist of extracts from the original
sources. Miss May Kendall translated or adapted Casanova's escape and
the piratical and Algerine tales. Mrs. Lang reduced the narrative of the
Chevalier Johnstone, and did the escapes of Caesar Borgia, of Trenck, and
Cervantes, while Miss Blackley renders that of Benvenuto Cellini. Mrs.
M