"HONORED SIR,--I send you a lad who wishes to serve his King truly; this lad was brought to me on Oct. 7, 1812. I am a poor day labourer, with ten children of my own; I have enough to do to get on at all. His mother asked me to bring up the boy. I asked her no questions, nor have I given notice to the county police that I had taken the boy. I thought I ought to take him as my son. I have brought him up as a good Christian, and since 1812 I have never let him go a step away from the house, so no one knows where he has been brought up, and he himself does not know the name of my house or of the place; you may ask him, but he can't tell you. I have taught him to read and to write; he can write as well as myself. When we ask him what he would like to be, he says a soldier, like his father. If he had parents (which he has not) he would have been a scholar: only show him a thing and he can do it. "Honoured Sir, you may question him, but he don't know where I live. I brought him away in the middle of the night; he can't find his way back." Dated, "From the Bavarian Frontier; place not named." The second letter ran thus:-- "The boy is baptized, his name is Kaspar; his other name you must give him. I ask you to bring him up. His father was a Schmolischer (trooper). When he is seventeen send him to Nuremberg to the 6th Schmolischer Regiment; that is where his father was. I beg you to bring him up till he is seventeen. He was born on April 30, 1812. I am so poor, I can't keep the boy; his father is dead." In answer to the Captain's questions the lad would only reply: "My foster-father bade me say, 'I don't know, your honour.'" The result was that he was placed in a prison cell in the castle. That was neither a fair nor a judicious proceeding. The garbled story of a wild man, a wronged man, quickly spread through the town. Feigning at first an intense fear and animal stupidity, it seems probable that Kaspar picked up from the visitors who discussed his history in his presence the suggestion of the marvellous tale which he presently told, and which made so tremendous a sensation. It was a tale demonstrably false on the face of it--of a life spent in close and solitary confinement in a cell, without knowledge of his kind or acquaintance with the outside world. Here is his story as he told it to the Nuremberg magistrates, and as it found acceptance in credulous quarters.