On August 30, 1875, Westervelt was brought to trial in the Court of Quarter Sessions, Philadelphia, Judge Elcock presiding. Theodore V. Burgin and George J. Berger, the two men who had helped the Van Brunts waylay and kill the two burglars, testified as to Douglas’ dying story. The witnesses above mentioned told their versions of what they had heard and observed. A porter in Stromberg’s Tavern, a drinking resort at 74 Mott Street, then not yet overrun by the Celestial hordes, testified that Westervelt was often at the Tavern drinking and consulting with Mosher and Douglas, that he had boasted he could name the kidnappers and that he had arranged for secret signals to reveal the presence of the two confederates now dead. Chief Walling also testified against the man. The jury returned a verdict of guilty on three counts of the indictment, reaching its decision on September 20, after long deliberation. On October 9, Judge Elcock sentenced the disgraced policeman to serve seven years in solitary confinement at labor, in the Eastern Penitentiary. Westervelt took his medicine. Never did he admit that the decision against him was just, confess that he had taken any part in the kidnapping or yield the least hint as to the fate of the unfortunate little boy. Nothing can touch the heart more than the fearful vigil of the parents in such a case. In his book, Christian K. Ross recites, without improper emotion, that, not counting the cases looked into for him by the Pinkertons, he personally or through others investigated two hundred and seventy-three children reported to be the lost Charlie. In every case there was a mistake or a deception. Some of the lads put forward were old enough to have been conventional uncles to him. In the following decades many strange rumors were bruited, many false trails followed to their empty endings, and many spurious or unbalanced claimants investigated and exposed. The Charlie Ross fever did not die down for a full generation, and even to-day mothers in the outlying States frighten their children into obedience with the name and rumor of this stolen boy. He has become a fearful tradition, a figure of pathos and terror for the generations. As recently as June 5 of the current year, the _Los Angeles Times_, a journal staid to reaction, printed long and credulous sticks of type to the effect that John W. Brown, ill in the General Hospital of Los Angeles, was really the long lost Charlie Ross. The evil rogue “confessed” that he had remained silent for fifty years in order to “guard the honor of my mother” and said he had been kidnapped by his “foster-father, William Henry Brown,” for revenge when Mrs. Ross “declined to have anything further to do with him.” Comment upon such caddism can be clinical only. The fact that the wretch who uttered it was sick and dying alone explains the fevered hallucination.