natural eloquence, quite wonderful in a
foreigner, unacquainted with our idioms and unaccustomed to platform
speaking. Whatever might be the subject, he always talked with an air of
modest truthfulness, and gave the most dramatic and startling
narratives, like an eyewitness on the stand, testifying under oath.
Never shall I forget Warsaw, nor the battle of Navarino, as rapidly
sketched by him in a sort of parenthesis, while he was lecturing upon a
very different subject; he wanted an illustration, and both of these
pictures flashed suddenly out upon us. The other lectures that followed
his first seemed, up to the very last, to grow better and better, until
we had faith, not only in his representations, but in the man himself.

Instead of shunning, he rather invited inquiry; and at an interview with
the late Mr. Edward Preble, son of the Commodore, when that gentleman
was questioning him about Tripoli, and was preparing to show him the
very charts used by the Commodore, the General refused to look at them,
and instantly drew a sketch of the harbor, with the castles, batteries,
and fortifications, and gave the soundings and approaches; and all
these, upon a careful examination, proved to be correct in every
particular, according to the testimony of Mr. Preble himself.

About this time, in consequence of the favorable notices that appeared
in our Portland papers, the Philadelphia Ledger, the Saturday Courier,
and some other journals of that city, opened upon him in full cry,
followed by the American press generally; the Courier declaring that he
had taken _leg bail_ and escaped from Canada,--that he had run away from
Rochester, after obtaining five hundred dollars from Henry McIlvaine,
Esq., of the Philadelphia bar, in the shape of fees for constituting
that gentleman "Consul-General of Greece"! By others he was charged with
being a tin-pedler, a horse-thief, and a leech-doctor, who had assumed
the title of Count long after his arrival in this country. Among many
anonymous letters--letters addressed to strangers in Portland--came one
from Henry McIlvaine himself, saying: "I see by the Portland papers,
that a man calling himself _sometimes_ General Bratish, at others
General Eliovich, Count Eliovich, Baron Fratelin and Walbeck, and
claiming to have been a general in the Polish, Spanish, Mexican, and
other armies, is now in your town; and I should suppose, from the papers
_who_ have noticed him, imposing upon respectable peo