rds
from his house. So agitated was he that Meyer would go no further,
especially as Kaspar would answer no questions. On their return,
Kaspar said, 'Went Court Garden--Man--had a knife--gave a
bag--struck--I ran as I could--bag must lie there.' Kaspar was found
to have a narrow wound, 'two inches and a half under the centre of the
left breast,' clearly caused by a very sharp double-edged weapon. In
three or four days he died, the heart had been injured. He was able to
depose, but not on oath, that on the morning of the 14th a man in a
blouse (who had addressed him some days earlier) brought him a verbal
message from the Court gardener, asking him to come and view some clay
from a newly bored well, where, in fact, no work was being done at
this time. He found no one at the well, and went to the monument of
the rather forgotten poet Uz. Here a man came forward, gave him a
bag, stabbed him, and fled. Of the man he gave discrepant
descriptions. He became incoherent, and died.

There was snow lying, when Kaspar was stabbed, but there were no
footmarks near the well, and elsewhere, only one man's track was in
the Hofgarten. Was that track Kaspar's? We are not told. No knife was
found. Kaspar was left-handed, and Dr. Horlacher declared that the
blow must have been dealt by a left-handed man. Lord Stanhope
suggested that Kaspar himself had inflicted the wound by pressure, and
that, after he had squeezed the point of the knife through his wadded
coat, it had penetrated much deeper than he had intended, a very
probable hypothesis.

As for the bag which the assassin gave him, it was found, and Dr.
Meyer said that it was very like a bag which he had seen in Kaspar's
possession. It contained a note, folded, said Madame Meyer, as Kaspar
folded his own notes. The writing was in pencil, in _Spiegelschrift_,
that is, it had to be read in a mirror. Kaspar, on his deathbed, kept
muttering incoherences about 'what is written with lead, no one can
read.' The note contained vague phrases about coming from the Bavarian
frontier.

After Kaspar's death, the question of 'murder or suicide?' agitated
Germany, and gave birth to a long succession of pamphlets. A wild
woman, Countess Albersdorf ('_nee_ Lady Graham,' says Miss Evans, who
later calls her 'Lady Caroline Albersdorf'), saw visions, dreamed
dreams, and published nonsense. Other pamphlets came out, directed
against the House of Baden. In 1870 an anonymous French pamphleteer
offered t