Not long afterward Lady Tichborne received her first letter from her missing “son”. He addressed her as “Dear Mama,” misspelled the Tichborne name by inserting a “t” after the “i,” spelled common words abominably, and handled the English language with a fine show of ignorance. Finally he referred to a birthmark and an incident at Brighton, of which Lady Tichborne had not the slightest recollection. At first she was considerably damped by these discrepancies and mistakes of the claimant, as the man in Wagga Wagga came shortly to be termed. But Lady Tichborne soon rallied from her doubts and asserted her absolute confidence in the genuineness of the far-away pretender to the baronetcy. Her stand in the matter was not inexplicable, even when it is recalled that subsequent letters from Australia revealed the claimant to be ignorant of common family traditions and totally confused about himself, even going so far as to say that he had been a common soldier in the carabineers, when Roger Tichborne had been an officer, and referring to his schooling at Winchester, whereas the Roman Catholic Tichbornes had, of course, sent their son to Stonyhurst. Lady Tichborne apparently ascribed such lapses to the “terrible ordeal” her boy had suffered, and she was not the only one to recognize that Roger Tichborne had himself, because of his early French training and the meagerness of his subsequent education, misspelled just such words as appeared incorrectly in the letters, and he had misused his English in a very similar fashion. These details are interesting rather than important. Whatever their final significance, Lady Tichborne sent money to Australia to pay for the claimant’s passage home. He arrived in England, unannounced, in the last month of 1866, and visited several localities, among them Wapping, a London district which played a vital part in what was to come. He also visited the vicinity of Tichborne Park and made numerous inquiries there. Only after these preliminaries did he cross to Paris, where he summoned Lady Tichborne to meet him. When she called at his hotel she found him in bed complaining of a bad cold. The room was dimly lighted, and she recounted afterward that he kept his face turned to the wall most of the time she spent with him. What were the lady’s feelings on first beholding this man is an interesting matter for speculation. She had sent away, thirteen years before, a slight, delicate, poetic aristocrat, whose chief characteristic was an excessive refinement that made him quite unfit for the common stresses of life. In his stead there came back a short, gross, enormously fat plebeian, with the lingual faults and vocal solecisms of the cockney. In the place of the young man who knew his French and did not know his English, here was a fellow who could speak not a word of the Gallic tongue and used his English abominably.