"At last," he read--"at last, my friends, after a lifetime of fruitless search, it seems that I have found--through the good offices of Dormer Colville--not the man we have sought, but his son. We have long suspected that Louis XVII must be dead. Madame herself, in her exile at Frohsdorff, has admitted to her intimates that she no longer hoped. But here in the full vigour of youth--a sailor, strong and healthy, living a simple life on shore as at sea--I have found a man whose face, whose form, and manner would clearly show to the most incredulous that he could be no other than the son of Louis XVII. A hundred tricks of manner and gesture he has inherited from the father he scarce remembers, from the grandfather who perished on the guillotine many years before he himself was born. No small proof of the man's sincerity is the fact that only now, after long persuasion, has he consented to place himself in our hands. I thought of hurrying at once to Frohsdorff to present to the aged Duchess a youth whom she cannot fail to recognize as her nephew. But better counsels have prevailed. Dormer Colville, to whom we owe so much, has placed us in his farther debt for a piece of sage advice. 'Wait,' he advises, 'until the young man has learned what is expected of him, until he has made the personal acquaintance of his supporters. Reserve until the end the presentation to the Duchesse d'Angouleme, which must only be made when all the Royalists in France are ready to act with a unanimity which will be absolute, and an energy which must prove irresistible.' "There are more material proofs than a face so strongly resembling that of Louis XVI and Monsieur d'Artois, in their early manhood, as to take the breath away; than a vivacity inherited from his grandmother, together with an independence of spirit and impatience of restraint; than the slight graceful form, blue eyes, and fair skin of the little prisoner of the Temple. There are dates which go to prove that this boy's father was rescued from a sinking fishing-boat, near Dieppe, a few days after the little Dauphin was known to have escaped from the Temple, and to have been hurried to the north coast disguised as a girl. There is evidence, which Monsieur Colville is now patiently gathering from these slow-speaking people, that the woman who was rescued with this child was not his mother. And there are a hundred details known to the villagers here which go to prove what we have always suspected to be the case, namely, that Louis XVII was rescued from the Temple by the daring and ingenuity of a devoted few who so jealously guarded their secret that they frustrated their own object; for they one and all must have perished on the guillotine, or at the hands of some other assassin, without divulging their knowledge, and in the confusion and horror of those days the little Dauphin was lost to sight.