could give practically no verifiable account of Browne's behaviour in
that missing fortnight. He said that he went from Providence to
Pawtucket, and was for some days at Philadelphia, Pa., where he really
seems to have been; as to the rest 'back of that it was mixed up.' We
do not hear that Kaspar was ever hypnotised and questioned, but
probably he also would have been 'mixed up,' like Mr. Bourne.

The fable about a Prince of Baden had not a single shred of evidence
in its favour. It is true that the Grand Duchess was too ill to be
permitted to see her dead baby, in 1812, but the baby's father,
grandmother, and aunt, with the ten Court physicians, the nurses and
others, must have seen it, in death, and it is too absurd to suppose,
on no authority, that they were all parties to the White Lady's plot.
We might as well believe, as Miss Evans seems to do, on the authority
of an unnamed Paris newspaper, that a Latin letter, complaining of
imprisonment, was picked up in the Rhine, signed 'S. Haues Spraucio,'
that the words ought to be read 'Hares Sprauka,' and that they are an
anagram of Kaspar Hauser. This occurred in 1816, when Kaspar, being
about four years of age, could not write Latin. No one in the secret
could have hoped that the Royal infant and captive would be recognised
under the name of Spraucio or even of Sprauka. Abject credulity, love
of mystery, love of scandal, and political passions, produced the
ludicrous mass of fables to which, as late as 1893, the Duchess of
Cleveland thought it advisable to reply. In England it is quite safe
to accuse a dead man of murder, or of what you please, as far as the
Duchess understood the law of libel, so she had no legal remedy.