The point here is that only one man and one woman could stay hid from the searching eyes of the law as long as six years. Evidently the business of vanishing presents some formidable difficulties. However, it is not even these solitary absentees that engage our interest most sharply, for usually we know why they went and have some indication that they are alive and merely skulking. There is another and far rarer genus of the family of the missing, however, that does strike hard upon that explosive chemical of human curiosity. Here we have those few and detached inexplicable affairs that neither astuteness nor diligence, time nor patience, frenzy nor faith can penetrate--the true romances, the genuine mysteries of vanishment. A man goes forth to his habitual labor and between hours he is gone from all that knew him, all that was familiar. There is a gap in the environment and many lives are affected, nearly or remotely. No one knows the why or where or how of his going and all the power of men and materials is hopelessly expended. Years pass and these tales of puzzlement become legends. They are then things to brood about before the fire, when the moving mind is touched by the inner mysteriousness of life. Again, there are those strange instances of the theft of human beings by human beings--kidnappings, in the usual term. Nothing except a natural cataclysm is so excitant of mass terror as the first suggestion that there are child-stealers abroad. What fevers and rages of the public temper may result from such crimes will be seen from some of what follows. The most celebrated instance is, of course, the affair of Charlie Ross of Philadelphia, which carries us back more than half a century. We have here the classic American kidnapping case, already a tradition, rich in all the elements that make the perfect abduction tale. This terror of the thief of children is, to be sure, as old as the races. From the Phoenicians who stole babes to feed to their bloody divinities, the Minoans who raped the youth of Greece for their bull-fights, and the priests of many lands who demanded maidens to satisfy the wrath of their gods and the lust of their flesh, down to the European Gypsies, who sometimes steal, or are said to steal, children for bridal gifts, we have this dread vein running through the body of our history. We need, accordingly, no going back into our phylogeny or biology, to understand the frenzy of the mother when the shadow of the kidnapper passes over her cote. The women of Normandy are said still to whisper with trembling the name of Gilles de Rais (or Retz), that bold marshal of France and comrade in arms of Jeanne d’Arc, who seems to have been a stealer and killer of children, instead of the original of Perrault’s Bluebeard, as many believe. What terror other kidnappers have sent into the hearts of parents will be seen from the text.