junior branch of the House,
reduced to imbecility by systematic ill-treatment, turned loose on the
world at the age of sixteen, and finally murdered, lest his secret
origin might be discovered.

I state first the theory of the second party in the dispute, which
believed that Kaspar was some great one: I employ language as
romantic as my vocabulary affords.

* * * * *

Darkness in Karlsruhe! 'Tis the high noon of night: October 15, 1812.
Hark to the tread of the Twelve Hours as they pass on the palace
clock, and join their comrades that have been! The vast corridors are
still; in the shadows lurk two burly minions of ambitious crime,
Burkard and Sauerbeck. Is that a white moving shadow which approaches
through the gloom? There arises a shriek, a heavy body falls, 'tis a
lacquey who has seen and recognised _The White Lady of the Grand Ducal
House_, that walks before the deaths of Princes. Burkard and Sauerbeck
spurn the inanimate body of the menial witness. The white figure,
bearing in her arms a sleeping child, glides to the tapestried wall,
and vanishes through it, into the Chamber of the Crown Prince, a babe
of fourteen days. She returns carrying _another_ unconscious infant
form, she places it in the hands of the ruffian Sauerbeck, she
disappears. The miscreant speeds with the child through a postern into
the park, you hear the trample of four horses, and the roll of the
carriage on the road. Next day there is silence in the palace, broken
but by the shrieks of a bereaved though Royal (or at least Grand
Ducal) mother. Her babe lies a corpse! The Crown Prince has died in
the night! The path to the throne lies open to the offspring of the
Countess von Hochberg, morganatic wife of the reigning Prince, Karl
Friedrich, and mother of the children of Ludwig Wilhelm August, his
youngest son.

Sixteen years fleet by; years rich in Royal crimes. 'Tis four of a
golden Whit Monday afternoon, in old Nuremberg, May 26, 1828. The town
lies empty, dusty, silent; her merry people are rejoicing in the green
wood, and among the suburban beer-gardens. One man alone, a shoemaker,
stands by the door of his house in the Unschlitt Plas: around him lie
the vacant streets of the sleeping city. His eyes rest on the form,
risen as it were out of the earth or fallen from the skies, of a boy,
strangely clad, speechless, incapable either of standing erect or of
moving his limbs. That boy is the Royal infant place