not relish mysteries, least of all mysteries whose solution may be
more disturbing than the original problem.

This is entirely confidential, but those papers which were in
that dispatch case kicked up the devil's own row in London, with
half the government bigwigs protesting their innocence to high
Heaven, and the rest accusing one another of complicity in the
hoax. If that was somebody's intention, it was literally a
howling success. For a while, it was even feared that there would
be questions in Parliament, but eventually, the whole vexatious
business was hushed.

You may tell Count Tarlburg's son that his little friend is a
most talented young lady; her sketch was highly commended by no
less an authority than Sir Thomas Lawrence, and here comes the
most bedeviling part of a thoroughly bedeviled business. The
picture was instantly recognized. It is a very fair likeness of
Benjamin Bathurst, or, I should say, Sir Benjamin Bathurst, who
is King's lieutenant governor for the Crown Colony of Georgia. As
Sir Thomas Lawrence did his portrait a few years back, he is in
an excellent position to criticize the work of Lieutenant von
Tarlburg's young lady. However, Sir Benjamin Bathurst was known
to have been in Savannah, attending to the duties of his office,
and in the public eye, all the while that his double was in
Prussia. Sir Benjamin does not have a twin brother. It has been
suggested that this fellow might be a half-brother, but, as far
as I know, there is no justification for this theory.

The General Bonaparte, alias the Emperor Napoleon, who is given so
much mention in the dispatches, seems also to have a counterpart