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 town, is certainly a puzzle. The earliest witnesses took him for a
journeyman tailor lad (he was about sixteen), and perhaps nobody paid
any attention to a dusty travelling tradesman, or groom out of place.
Feuerbach (who did not see Kaspar till July) says that his feet were
covered with blisters, the gaoler says that they were merely swollen
by the tightness of his boots.

Once in prison, Kaspar, who asked to be taken home, adopted the _rôle_
of 'a semi-unconscious animal,' playing with toy horses, 'blind though
he saw,' yet, not long after, he wrote a minute account of all that he
had then observed. He could only eat bread and water: meat made him
shudder, and Lord Stanhope says that this peculiarity did occur in the
cases of some peasant soldiers. He had no sense of hearing, which
means, perhaps, that he did not think of pretending to be amazed by