Samuel Bergne, for many years an able and much-appreciated secretary of the British and Foreign Bible Society, was another of my fellow-students. With him I became extremely intimate, owing, in part, to an extraordinary family affair, which I have been requested to relate. My father, before he married, had living with him a sister, to whom he was strongly attached. After their separation, she went to reside in London, and dropped all correspondence with him; to the day of his death he could never ascertain what had become of her. Methods were adopted to find out her residence, but all in vain. More than thirty years had elapsed since she disappeared, when one day I met Bergne, who had been visiting his mother at Brompton. “Have not you a relative there?” he asked. “Not that I know of,” was my reply. Then he told me that an evening or two before, as he was sitting by the fire, it flashed upon him how he had heard that an old friend of his mother’s, before her marriage, bore the same name as mine; that she came from Norwich, and that her brother was a lawyer. I was taken aback by what my friend said, and then related what I had heard in childhood respecting my father’s long-lost sister. “Depend upon it,” he exclaimed, “I have found for you the lady your family have been seeking in vain.” I soon received a request to meet the stranger at Mrs. Bergne’s house, when something like a scene occurred, as the separated relatives stood face to face. Yet neither then nor afterwards did she shed any light upon the mystery. She had a husband who proved to be no less a mystery. We never could learn anything about his connections; but, at the time of my introduction to him he was engaged on _The Morning Post_. We afterwards learned from himself, as well as others, that he had been employed in this country as an agent of the Imperial French Court; certainly he had in his possession a key to the cipher-writing, used by the first Napoleon. He showed me relics of that extraordinary man, and had much to say of several notabilities at home and abroad. What of fact mingled with fiction in his strange disclosures I cannot say; but, after his death, I saw some of his papers, including an unintelligible correspondence between Mr. Canning and himself; also letters relating to private scandals of great people, only fit to be thrown into the fire. He lived in an imaginary world, and used to say that Napoleon Buonaparte was still living. To his influence, I suppose, the mystery which shrouded my aunt’s life after her marriage, might be ascribed.