In the Polish insurrection of 1830-31, a certain Alexander Ubrik played a part sufficiently noteworthy to get himself exiled to Siberia for life, leaving behind him a wife and four young daughters, the third of whom, Barbara, was the chief figure of the subsequent affair. But the Ubrik family had already known the feel of the romantic fabric and there had already been a remarkable disappearance mystery involving a relative no more remote than the mother of Barbara and wife of the banished Alexander. It is with this part of the family history that much of the literary offspring deals. About the year 1800, according to the account of the celebrated Polish detective Masilewski, extensively quoted by his American friend and compeer, the late George S. McWatters of the United States Secret Service, the first of the series of astonishing scenes involving the Ubrik family was played in Warsaw. There was then resident in the Polish capital one Jaromir Ubrik, the profligate son of an old and noble Polish house who had wasted his substance in gambling and roistering. Ubrik, though fallen into disrepute among his former friends, was still intimate with a few of the aristocratic families, among them that of Count Michael Satorin. The Countess Satorin had borne her lord several daughters but no son to succeed to the title. When, in the year mentioned, Mme. Satorin yielded still another daughter, her husband being then absent in Russia, she sought to forestall the wrath and disappointment of her spouse by substituting a male child. It happened that the wife of Jaromir Ubrik had borne a son only two days earlier and died in childbirth. For the consideration of ten thousand florins, Ubrik consented to exchange children with the countess, who said she was additionally persuaded to the arrangement by the fact that the Ubrik blood was as good as her own and the boy thus fit to wear a title. The little Ubrik boy was, accordingly, delivered to the countess and her little daughter turned over to Jaromir Ubrik, nestled in a down lined basket with a fine gold chain and cross about her neck. The elements of a thousand plots will be apparent even at this early stage of the story. But far more fabulous-seeming things followed immediately. Ubrik took the basket containing the little girl and started home. On the way, following his unhappy weakness, he entered a tavern and began to spend some of the money he had been paid. He got drunk, staggered home without the little girl in her basket and returned the following day to find that a nameless Jew had claimed this strange parcel and disappeared.