or some days, until he reached the highway, where
he was discovered by the passing traveller, as above narrated.

When this tale was made public, it naturally created great excitement,
and people set themselves to discover the identity of this foundling,
whom the Abbe de l'Epee had named Joseph. The Abbe himself was never
tired of conjecturing the possible history of his protege, or of
communicating his conjectures to his friends. At length, in the year
1777, a lady, who had heard the boy's story, suggested a solution of
the mystery. She mentioned that in the autumn of 1773, a deaf and dumb
boy, the only son and heir of Count Solar, and head of the ancient and
celebrated house of Solar, had left Toulouse, where his father and
mother then dwelt, and had not returned. It had been given out that he
had died, but she suggested that the account of his death was false,
and that Joseph was the young Count Solar. Inquiries were instituted,
and showed that the hypothesis was at least tenable. The family of
Count Solar had consisted of his wife and a son and daughter. The son
was deaf and dumb, and was twelve years old at his father's death,
which occurred in 1773. After the decease of the old count, the boy
was sent by his mother to Bagneres de Bigorre, under the care of a
young lawyer, named Cazeaux, who came back to Toulouse early in the
following year, with the story that the heir had died of small-pox.
The mother died in 1775.

The Abbe de l'Epee, astounded by the striking similarity between the
facts and Joseph's account of himself, at once came to the conclusion
that Providence had chosen him as the instrument for righting a great
wrong, and set himself to supply the missing links in the chain of
evidence, and to restore his ward to what he doubted not was his
rightful inheritance. He maintained that young Solar's mother, either
wearied with the care of a child who was deprived of speech and
hearing, or to secure his estates for herself or her daughter, had
given her son to Cazeaux to be exposed, and that that ruffian had made
tolerably certain of his work, by carrying the lad 600 miles from
home, to the vicinity of Peronne, and there abandoning him in a dense
wood, from which the chances were he would never be able to extricate
himself, but in the mazes of which he would wander till he died. God
alone, the Abbe declared, guided the helpless and hungry lad within
the reach of human assistance, and sent the traveller to re