old acquaintances to befriend him there. This letter was answered by Castro through his son Pedro, with numerous good wishes and much gossip about Melipilla, and what had become of the old circle. But to the astonishment and dismay of the Claimant's attorney, Mr. Holmes, Pedro Castro reminded his old correspondent, that when among them he had gone by the name of Arthur Orton. A Melipilla lady named Ahumada then sent a portion of a lock of hair which the Claimant acknowledged as his own hair, and thanked her for. But this lady declared that she had cut the lock from the head of an English lad named Arthur Orton; and the Claimant thereupon said that he must have been mistaken in thanking her, and acknowledging it as his. In the town of Melipilla--sixty or seventy miles inland from Valparaiso--everyone of the sixteen or seventeen persons mentioned by the Claimant as old acquaintances--except those who were dead or gone away--came before the Commission, and were examined. They proved to have substantially but one tale to tell. They said they never knew any one of the name of Tichborne. Melipilla is a remote little towns far off the great high road, and the only English person, except an English doctor there established, who had ever sojourned there, was a sailor lad who, not in 1853, but in 1849, came to them destitute; was kindly treated; picked up Spanish enough to converse in an illiterate way; said his name was Arthur, and was always called Arthur by them; declared his father was "a butcher named Orton, who served the queen;" and said he had been sent to sea to cure St. Vitus's Dance, but had been ill-used by the captain, and ran away from his ship at Valparaiso. This lad, they stated, sojourned in Melipilla eighteen months, and finally went back to Valparaiso and re-embarked for England. Don Tomas Castro, the doctor's wife, and others, declared they recognised the features of this lad in the portrait of the Claimant; and being shown two daguerreotype portraits of Roger Tichborne, taken in Chili when he was there, said that the features were not like those of any person they had ever known. Searches were then made in the records of the consul's office at Valparaiso, from which it resulted that a sailor named Arthur Orton did desert from the English ship "Ocean" in that port at the very date mentioned, and did re-embark, though under the name of "Joseph M. Orton," about eighteen months later.