de public; or, rather, it was
there that he was first suspected of having made it. This is about all
that I personally know of the now immortal Von Kempelen; but I have
thought that even these few details would have interest for the public.

There can be little question that most of the marvellous rumors afloat
about this affair are pure inventions, entitled to about as much credit
as the story of Aladdin's lamp; and yet, in a case of this kind, as in
the case of the discoveries in California, it is clear that the truth
may be stranger than fiction. The following anecdote, at least, is so
well authenticated, that we may receive it implicitly.

Von Kempelen had never been even tolerably well off during his residence
at Bremen; and often, it was well known, he had been put to extreme
shifts in order to raise trifling sums. When the great excitement
occurred about the forgery on the house of Gutsmuth & Co., suspicion
was directed toward Von Kempelen, on account of his having purchased
a considerable property in Gasperitch Lane, and his refusing, when
questioned, to explain how he became possessed of the purchase money. He
was at length arrested, but nothing decisive appearing against him, was
in the end set at liberty. The police, however, kept a strict watch upon
his movements, and thus discovered that he left home frequently, taking
always the same road, and invariably giving his watchers the slip in the
neighborhood of that labyrinth of narrow and crooked passages known
by the flash name of the 'Dondergat.' Finally, by dint of great
perseverance, they traced him to a garret in an old house of seven
stories, in an alley called Flatzplatz,--and, coming upon him suddenly,
found him, as they imagined, in the midst of his counterfeiting
operations. His agitation is represented as so excessive that the
officers had not the slightest doubt of his guilt. After hand-cuffing
him, they searched his room, or rather rooms, for it appears he occupied
all the mansarde.

Opening into the garret where they caught him, was a closet, ten feet by
eight, fitted up with some chemical apparatus, of which the object has
not yet been ascertained. In one corner of the closet was a very small
furnace, with a glowing fire in it, and on the fire a kind of duplicate
crucible--two crucibles connected by a tube. One of these crucibles was
nearly full of lead in a state of fusion, but not reaching up to the
aperture of the tube, which was close to th