Bosco was not only a clever magician, but a man of many adventures, so that his life reads like a romance. This soldier of fortune, Bartolomeo Bosco, was born of a noble Piedmont family, on January 11th, 1793, in Turin, Italy. From boyhood he showed great ability as a necromancer, but at the age of nineteen he was forced to serve under Napoleon I. in the Russian campaign. He was a fusilier in the Eleventh Infantry, and at the battle of Borodino was injured in an engagement with Cossacks. Pierced by a lance, he lay upon the ground apparently dead. A Cossack callously roamed among the dead and dying, rifling pockets and belts. When he came to the form of Bosco, that youth feigned death, knowing that resistance to the ghoul meant a death wound. But while the Cossack robbed the Italian soldier, the latter stealthily raised his unwounded arm and by sleight-of-hand rifled the well-filled pockets of the ghoul, which fact was not discovered by the Cossack until he was far from the field of the dead and dying, where he had left one of the enemy considerably better off, thanks to Bosco's conjuring gifts. Later Bosco was sent captive to Siberia, where he perfected his sleight-of-hand while amusing fellow-prisoners and jailers. In 1814 he was released and returned to his native land, where he studied medicine, but eventually decided to become a public entertainer. He was not only a clever entertainer, but a good business man, and he planned each year on saving enough money to insure a life of ease in his old age. But events intervened to ruin all his well-laid plans. The sins of his youth brought their penalty. An illegitimate son, Eugene, became a heavy drag upon the retired magician, who was compelled to pay large sums to the young man in order to prevent his playing in either France or Germany or assuming the name of Bosco. In a German antiquary's shop at Bonn on the Rhine I found an agreement in which Bosco agreed to pay this youth five thousand francs for not using the name of Bosco. This agreement is too long for reproduction in this volume, but unquestionably it is genuine and tells all too eloquently the troubles which beset Bosco in his old age. Eugene was said to be the superior of his famous father in sleight-of-hand, but he was wild and given to excesses. Women and wine checked what might have been a brilliant professional career. Disabled, poverty-stricken, and respected by none, he soon disappeared from the conjuring world, and according to Carl Willman in the "Zauberwelt" he died miserably in Hungary in 1891. [Illustration: Only photograph of Madame Bosco, given to the author by Mrs. Mueller, Madame Bosco's niece, at the funeral of Wiljalba Frikell.] [Illustration: The author at the grave of Bosco. From a photograph in the Harry Houdini Collection.]