I was walking through the Court House looking at the arrangement of the newly erected portion of the building, and while in the rooms occupied by the Water Board, I accidentally stumbled upon an old memorandum book which had evidently been misplaced during the recent removal of this department from their old quarters on Wells Street to the first floor of the west wing. Upon examination it proved to be a kind of diary, and was written with pencil in the German character. On the inside of the front cover, near the upper right hand corner, was inscribed the name Gustav Stahlmann, and underneath a date—1865. A small portion of the book, the first part, was filled with accounts, some of them of expenditures, others memoranda of days’ work in different parts of the city, and under various foremen. But it was to the body of the book that my attention was particularly called. This was in the journal form, being a record of successive occurrences with the attending thoughts. The entries were made at irregular intervals and without any regard to system. Sometimes it had been written in daily for a considerable period, then dropped, and taken up again apparently at the whim of the owner. In places there appeared no connection between the parts separated by a break of even short duration; at others the sense was obscure, and could only be attained by implication. The earliest records in the second part were in June, 1867, and I found dates regularly inserted as late as the November following. In December they ceased entirely; afterward the diary, if such it might then be called, was either by the day or the week, or without any direct evidence as to the time when the circumstances therein narrated had occurred. In fact, throughout the whole of the concluding portion there was nothing to indicate that the matter had not been written on a single occasion, except the variations which almost every person’s hand-writing exhibits when produced under different degrees of nervous excitement. From this black morocco memorandum book; from the hand-writing of Gustav Stahlmann himself, I learned the incidents of his career after I parted from him. They constitute the history of a fate so horrible in every respect, that I shudder at the thought that any human being was doomed to experience it. The main facts in this narrative I have translated, sometimes literally, at others using my own language, where the thoughts in the original were so carelessly or obscurely expressed as to render any other course simply impossible.