Baffled in several fields of notoriety which he had worked, Williams suddenly posed before the American public, in 1853, as the hereditary sovereign of France. He was too young by eight years to be the lost dauphin; that he was clearly of Indian origin was proved by a close examination of his color, form, and feature; his dusky parents protested under oath that the wayward Eleazer was their son; every allegation of his in regard to the matter has often been exposed as false; and all his neighbors who knew him treated his claims as fraudulent. Nevertheless, he succeeded in deceiving a number of good people, including several leading clergymen of his church; one of the latter attempted in an elaborate book, "The Lost Prince," to prove conclusively that Williams was indeed the son of the executed monarch. The pretensions of Eleazer Williams, who dearly loved the notoriety which this discussion awakened, extended through several years. They even won some little attention in France, but far less than here, for several other men had claimed to be the lost dauphin, so that the pretension was not a new one over there. Louis Philippe, the head of the Bourbon-Orleans family in France, sent him a present of some finely bound books, believing him the innocent victim of a delusion; but, further than that, and a chance meeting at Green Bay, between Eleazer Williams and another French royalist, the Prince de Joinville, then on his travels through America, the family in France paid no attention to the adventurous half-breed American Indian who claimed to be one of them. The reputation of Williams as a missionary had at last fallen so low, and the neglect of his duties was so persistent, that his salary was withdrawn by the Episcopal Church, and his closing years were spent in poverty. He died in 1858, maintaining his absurd claims to the last. SLAVE CATCHING IN WISCONSIN There had been a few negro slaves in Wisconsin before the organization of the Territory and during Territorial days. They had for the most part been brought in by lead miners from Kentucky and Missouri. But, as the population increased, it was seen that public opinion here, as in most of the free States, was strongly opposed to the practice of holding human beings as chattels. Gradually the dozen or more slaves were returned to the South, or died in service, or were freed by their masters; so that, at an early day, the slavery question had ceased to be of local importance here.