eeled as he
walked,' and would answer no questions. In 1834 Merk expanded, and
said 'we had a long chat.' Kaspar averred that he could read and
write, and had crossed the frontier daily on his way to school. 'He
did not know where he came from.' Certainly Merk, in 1834, remembered
much more than in 1829. Whether he suppressed facts in 1829, or, in
1834, invented fables, we do not know. The cavalry captain (November
2, 1829) remembered several intelligent remarks made by Kaspar. His
dress was new and clean (denied by Feuerbach), he was tired and
footsore. The evidence of the police, taken in 1834, was remote in
time, but went to prove that Kaspar's eyesight and power of writing
were normal. Feuerbach absolutely discredits all the sworn evidence of
1829, without giving his own sources. The early evidence shows that
Kaspar could both walk and talk, and see normally, by artificial and
natural light, all of which is absolutely inconsistent with Kaspar's
later account of himself.

The personal property of Kaspar was a horn rosary, and several
Catholic tracts with prayers to the Guardian Angel, and so forth.
Feuerbach holds that these were furnished by 'devout villains'--a very
sound Protestant was Feuerbach--and that Kaspar was ignorant of the
being of a Deity, at least of a Protestant Deity. The letter carried
by the boy said that the writer first took charge of him, as an
infant, in 1812, and had never let him 'take a single step out of my
house.... I have already taught him to read and write, _and he writes
my handwriting exactly as I do_.' In the same hand was a letter in
Latin characters, purporting to come from Kaspar's mother, 'a poor
girl,' as the author of the German letter was 'a poor day-labourer.'
Humbug as I take Kaspar to have been, I am not sure that he wrote
these pieces. If not, somebody else was in the affair; somebody who
wanted to get rid of Kaspar. As that youth was an useless, false,
convulsionary, and hysterical patient, no one was likely to want to
keep him, if he could do better. No specified reward was offered at
the time for information about Kaspar; no portrait of him was then
published and circulated. The Burgomaster, Binder, had a portrait, and
a facsimile of Kaspar's signature engraved, but Feuerbach would not
allow them to be circulated, heaven knows why.

How Kaspar fell, as it were from the clouds, and unseen, into the
middle of Nuremberg, even on a holiday when almost every one was out
of