Johann Salvator had, from adolescence, been a close personal friend of the Austrian crown prince. This intimacy had extended even to participation in some of the personal and sentimental escapades for which the ill-starred Rudolf was remarkable. Apparently the two men hardly held an opinion apart, and it was accepted that, with the death of the aging emperor and the accession of his son, Johann Salvator would be a most powerful personage. Suddenly, in 1889, all these high hopes and promises came to earth. After some rumblings and rumorings at Schoenbrunn, it was announced that Johann Salvator had petitioned the emperor for permission to resign all rank and title, sever his official connection with the royal house, and even give up his knighthood in the Order of the Golden Fleece. The petitioner also asked for the right to call himself Johann Orth, after the estate and castle on the Gmündensee, which was the favorite abode of the prince and of his aged mother. All these requests were officially granted and confirmed by the emperor, and so the man John Orth came into being. The first of the two Orth mysteries lies concealed behind the official records of this strange resignation from rank and honor. Even to-day, after Orth has been missing for a whole generation, after all those who might have been concerned in keeping secret the motives and measures of those times have been gathered to the dust, and after the empire itself has been dissolved into its defeated components, the facts in the matter cannot be stated with any confidence. There are two principal versions of the affair, and both will have to be given so that the reader may make his own choice. The popular or romantic account deserves to be considered first. In the eighties the stage of Vienna was graced by several handsome young women of the name Stübel. One of them, Lori, achieved considerable operatic distinction. Another sailed to New York with her brother and appeared in operetta and in musical comedy at the old Casino. The youngest of these sisters was Ludmilla Stübel, commonly called Millie, and on that account sometimes, erroneously, Emilie. This daring and charming girl began her career in a Viennese operetta chorus and rose to the rank of principal. She was not, so far as I can gather from the contemporary newspapers, remarkable for voice or dramatic ability, but her “surpassingly voluptuous beauty and piquant manners” won her almost limitless attention and gave her a popularity that reached across the Atlantic. In the middle eighties Fräulein Stübel appeared at the Thalia Theater in the Bowery, New York, then the shrine of German comic opera in the United States, creating the rôles of _Bettina_ in “The Mascot” and _Violette_ in “The Merry War.”