e you to produce it?"

"Ten minutes."

"Very well,"--taking out my watch,--"I will wait fifteen, and my friend
here will stay with me, and be a witness."

Away went the General, and, to my amazement, I must acknowledge, within
the fifteen minutes he returned, bringing with him a cigar-box
containing about five hundred dollars in bills and specie, which I
counted.

Here was a narrow escape,--a matter of life or death to him, certainly,
if not to me. But where had he got the money? He was very poor, judging
by appearances. The lecturing was over for a time, and there was no
field for conjecture. To this hour the whole affair is a mystery.
Unlikely as it was that he should have obtained it from his sister,
there seemed to be no other explanation possible.

Other perplexing and contradictory evidence for and against the General
began to appear. I never saw him on horseback but once, and then I was
frightened for him. As a general, he ought, of course, to know how to
ride. As a native Hungarian, he must have been born _to_ the saddle, if
not _in_ it. Nevertheless, I trembled for him, though the creature he
had mounted was far from being either vicious or spirited; and then,
too, when he tried waltzing, he reminded me, and others I am afraid, of
"the man a-mowing."

On the other hand, he was well-bred and self-possessed, full of accurate
information, and never obtrusive. And here I am reminded of another
singular circumstance, which went far in confirmation of the story he
told. He gave J. S. Buckingham, Esq., M. P., whom I had known in London
as the Oriental traveller, a letter to me, in which he speaks of him as
a member of the British-Polish Committee in London,--thereby endangering
the whole superstructure he had been rearing with so much care. Mr.
Buckingham wrote me from New York, but failed to see me.

Worn out and wellnigh discouraged by these persecutions, the General now
left us, and went to New York, from which place he wrote me, under date
of October 9, 1840, as follows. I give his own orthography, to show
that, although acquainted with our language to such a degree that he was
able to lecture in it, as Kossuth did, and to speak it with uncommon
readiness, he must have learnt it by _ear_, like many others with which
he was familiar enough for ordinary purposes.

"One of my last occupation upon American soil is one of a painful, and
at the same times pleasant nature, to wit, to address you, my noble, my
c