This volume is not intended as a handbook of mysteries, for such works exist in numbers. The author has limited himself to problems of disappearance and cases of kidnapping, thereby excluding many twice-told wonders--the wandering Ahasuerus, the Flying Dutchman, Prince Charles Edward, the Dauphin, Gosselin’s _Femme sans nom_, the changeling of Louis Philippe and the Crown Prince Rudolf and the affair at Mayerling. Neither have I attempted any technical exploration of the conduct and motives of vanishers and kidnappers. It must be sufficiently clear that a man unpursued who flees and hides is out of tune with his environment, ill adjusted, nervously unwell. Nor need we accent again the fact that all criminals, kidnappers included, are creatures of disease or defect. A general bibliography will be found at the end of the book. The information to be had from these volumes has been liberally supported and amplified from the files of contemporary newspapers in the countries and cities where these dramas of doubt were played. The records of legal trials have been consulted in instances where trials took place and I have talked with the accessible officials having knowledge of the cases or persons here treated. E. H. S. New York, August, 1927. MYSTERIES OF THE MISSING I THE CHARLIE ROSS ENIGMA Late on the afternoon of the twenty-seventh of June, 1874, two men in a shabby-covered buggy stopped their horse under the venerable elms of Washington Lane in Germantown, that sleepy suburb of Philadelphia, with its grave-faced revolutionary houses and its air of lavendered maturity. All about these intruders was historic ground. Near at hand was the Chew House, where Lord Howe repulsed Washington and his tattered command in their famous encounter. Yonder stood the old Morris Mansion, where the British commander stood cursing the fog, while his troops retreated from the surprise attack. Here the impetuous Agnew fell before a backwoods rifleman, and there Mad Anthony Wayne was forced to decamp by the fire of his confused left. Not far away the first American Bible had been printed, and that ruinous house on the ridge had once been the American Capitol. The whole region was a hive of memories. Strangely enough, the men in the buggy gave no sign of interest in all these things. Instead, they devoted their attention to the two young sons of a grocer who happened to be playing among the bushes on their father’s property. The children were gradually attracted to confidence by the strangers, who offered them sweets and asked them who they were, where their parents were staying, how old they might be, and how they might like to go riding.