As they strode down from the hill which was the scene of the nocturnal gallop into a valley confused with patches of mist; there marched out from it to meet them three garrison regiments on the double-quick. Each regiment was four men strong and as many deep, without powder or shoes, but provided with fine openwork high-ruffles,--that is to say, with porous pantaloons, and with superfluous officers, because there were no privates for them at all. When I now go on in my description to add, that both staffs, as well the regimental as the general staff, had over six hundred cannon in their pockets, and in fact a whole siege-train of artillery, and that the first platoon had wholly new _yellow_ b.a.l.l.s,[14] unusual in war, which germinated sooner than the gunpowder sowed by the savages, and which they thrust with the tongue into the muskets,--I should (I fear) make my readers, especially my lady readers, a little too distressed (and the more as I have not yet hinted whether these were soldier-parents or soldier-children) if I were to dip my pen again, and actually append the annoying circ.u.mstance that the troops began to fire at the befogged Court-Chaplain,--unless I leaped forward instanter with the information beforehand that a man's voice from behind the army cried, "Halt!"

Forth came out of the rear ranks the general field-marshal, who was just as tall again as his lieutenant of artillery;--with a round hat, with flying arms and hair, he rushed impetuously upon Flamin, and attacked him with intent to destroy,--less from hatred than from love.

It was the Doctor! The two friends hung trembling in each other's arms, face buried in face, breast pushed back from breast, with souls that had no words, but only tears of joy: the first embrace ended in a second,--the first utterances were their two names.

The Chaplain had volunteered as a private along with the army, and stood with tried feelings on his insulating-stool, with a bare neck, around which nothing clung. "Just hug each other a moment longer," said he, and turned half-way round: "I must station myself only just a minute or two at the hazel-bush yonder, but I will be back again directly, and then I, in my turn, will embrace Mr. Doctor with a thousand pleasures." But Horion understood the natural recoil of love; he flew from the son's arms into those of the father, and lingered long therein, and made all good again.

With appeased love, with dancing hearts, with overflowing eyes, under the full bloom of heaven and over the garniture of earth,--for Spring had opened her casket of brilliants, and flung blooming jewels into all the vales, and over all the hills, and even far up the mountains,--the two friends sauntered blissfully along, the British hand clasping the German. Sebastian Horion could not say anything to Flamin, but he talked with the father, and every indifferent sound made his bosom, laden with blood and love, breathe more freely.

The three regiments had gone out of every one's head; but they had themselves marched obediently after the general field-marshal.

Sebastian, too humane to forget any one, turned round toward the escort of little Sansculottes, who came, however, not from Paris, but from Flachsenfingen, and had attended him as begging soldier-children. "My children," said he, and looked at nothing but his standing army, "to-day is for your generalissimo and you, the memorable day on which he does three things. In the first place, I discharge you; but my retrenchment shall not hinder you any more than a prince's would from begging; secondly, I pay each of you arrearage for three years; namely, to each officer an allowance of three seventeen-kreutzer-pieces, because we have in these days raised the wages; thirdly, run back again to-morrow, and I will have all the regiments measured for breeches."

He turned toward the Chaplain, and said: "It is much better to make presents in articles than in money, because grat.i.tude for the latter is spent as soon as that is; but in a pair of presented pantaloons, grat.i.tude lasts as long as the overhauls themselves."

The only bad thing about it will be, that the Prince of Flachsenfingen and his war-ministry will at last interfere in the matter of the trousers, since neither can possibly allow regular troops to have more _on_ their bodies than _in_ them, namely, anything at all. In our days it should at last enter the heads of the stupidest commissary of equipment and provisioning,--but in fact there are discreet ones,--first, that, of two soldiers, the hungry is always to be preferred to the well-fed one, because it is already known, by the case of whole peoples, that the less they have, so much the braver they are; secondly, that just as, in Blotzheim,[15] of two equally virtuous youths, the poorer is crowned, even so the poor subject is preferred to the rich, though they may be equally courageous, and is alone enlisted, because the poor devil is better acquainted with hunger and frost; and, thirdly, that now, when on all the steps of the throne, as on walls, cannon are placed (as the sun receives its brilliancy from thousands of vomiting volcanoes), and, as in a well-conditioned state, the rod of up-shooting manhood is forced into ramrods,--the people advantageously fall into two cla.s.ses of paupers,--the protected and their protectors; and, fourthly, the Devil take him who grumbles!

When my three beloved _personae_ at length arrived in front of the parsonage, the whole disbanded army had secretly marched after them and demanded the breeches. But something still greater had travelled after them from Flachsenfingen,--the blind lord. Hardly had the Britoness smiled-in her young guest, not politely, but delightedly, hardly had Agatha, for the first time, seriously, hid herself behind her mother, and old Appel behind the pots and kettles, when Eymann, who was in the midst of his cleaning, made a long leap from the window at which four Englanders--not foreigners, but horses--came trotting up. Now for the first time the question occurred to every one, where the oculist was; and Sebastian had hardly time to reply, that there was no one else to come, for he himself was to operate on his father. Into the short interval which the father occupied in pa.s.sing from the carriage-door to the room-door the son had to squeeze in the fib, or rather the entreaty _for_ the fib, which the family was to put upon his Lordship, that his son had not yet arrived, but only the oculist, whom a recent apoplectic attack had deprived of his speech.

I and the reader stand amidst such a throng of people, that I have not yet been able even to tell him that Dr. Culpepper had as good as punched out the lord's left eye with the blunt couching-needle; in order, therefore, to save the right eye of his beloved father, Sebastian had applied himself to the cure of those impoverished beings, who, as regards their sight, already grope round in Orcus, and only with four of their senses stand any longer outside the grave.

When the son beheld the dear form veiled in such a long night, for whom there was no longer child or sunlight, he slid his hand, whose pulse trembled with pity, joy, and hope, under Eymann's, and hurriedly extended it, and pressed the father's under a strange name. But he had to go out of the house door again, till the trembling of his hand under the weight of the salvation it was bringing should subside, and he restrained out there his heart beating with hope by the thought that the operation might be unsuccessful; he looked with a smile up and down along the twelve-horse-team of the corps of cadets, that the emotion and yearning might pa.s.s from his excited breast. In-doors, meanwhile, the Chaplain's wife had made the blind man a still blinder one, and lied to him _quantum satis_; whenever a lie, a pious fraud, a _dolum bonum_, a poetic and legal fiction is to be gotten up, women offer themselves readily as business secretaries and court-printers, and help out their honest man. "I very much wish," said the father, as the son entered, "that the operation might at once proceed before my son arrives." The Chaplain's wife brought back the anxious son and disclosed to him the paternal wish. He stepped lightly forward amidst the embarra.s.sed company. The room was shaded, the couching-lancet brought forth, and the diseased eye steadied. All stood with anxious attention around the composed patient. The Chaplain peered with a ludicrous anxiety and agony at the sleeping infant, prepared, at the least cry, to run with it immediately out of the couching-chamber.

Agatha and Flamin kept themselves far from the patient, and both were equally serious. Flamin's n.o.ble mother drew near with her heart seized at once by joy and anxiety and love, and with her overflowing eyes, which obeyed her agitated heart. Victor wept for fear and for joy beside his dumb father, but he pa.s.sionately smothered every drop that might disturb him. Thus does every operation, by the climax of preparation, communicate to the spectator heart-beating and trembling.

Only the veiled Briton,--a man who lifted his head coldly and serenely, like a high mountain over a torrid zone,--he offered to the filial hand a face silent and motionless; he kept composed and mute before the fate which was now to decide whether his dreary night should reach even to the grave or no farther than this minute....

Fate said, Let there be light, and there was. The invisible destiny took a son's anxious hand and opened therewith an eye, which was worthy of a finer night than this starless one. Victor pressed the mature lens of the cataract--that smoke-ball[16] and cloud cast over creation--down into the bottom of the pupil; and so, when an atom had been sunk three lines deep, a man possessed immensity again, and a father his son.

Oppressed mortal! thou that art at once a _son_ and a _slave_ of the dust, how slight is the thought, the moment, the drop of blood or tear-drop, that is required to overflow thy wide brain, thy wide heart!

And if a couple of blood-globules can become, now thy Montgolfier's globes and now thy Belidor's percussion-b.a.l.l.s,[17] ah, how little earth it takes to exalt or to crush thee!

"Victor! thou? Is it thou who hast cured me, my son?" said the delivered man, taking the hand that was still armed with the surgical instrument. "Lay it aside and bandage me again! I rejoice that I saw thee first of all." The son could not stir for emotion. "Bandage me, the light is painful! _Was_ it thou? speak!" He bandaged in silence the open eye amidst the glad tears of his own. But when the bandage hid from that n.o.ble stoical soul everything, his blushing and his weeping, then was it impossible for the happy son to contain himself any longer;--he gave himself up to his heart, and clung with his tears upon the veiled countenance to which he had given back brighter days; and when he felt on his trembling breast the _quicker_ beatings of his father's heart, and the _tighter_ embrace of his grat.i.tude,--then was the best child the happiest,--and all rejoiced at his joy, and congratulated the son more than the father....

Twelve cannon went off from that number of door-keys. They shot this History dead.

For now it is actually gone,--not a word, not a syllable of it do I know any longer. In fact I have never in my life seen or heard or dreamed of, or romantically invented, any Horion or any St. Luna;--the Devil and I know how it is; and I, on my part, have, besides, better things to do and to lay open now, namely,

THE OVERTURE AND SECRET INSTRUCTIONS.

Another would have been stupid enough to begin at the very beginning; but I thought to myself, I can at any time tell where I live,--in fact, at the Equator, for I reside on the island of _St. John's_, which lies, as is well known, in the East Indian waters, which are entirely surrounded by the princ.i.p.ality of _Scheerau_. For nothing can be less unknown to good houses, which keep their regular literary waste-book (the Fair-Catalogue) and their regular stock-book (the Literary Times), than my latest home product, the _Invisible Lodge_,--a work, the reading of which my sovereign should make still more obligatory on his children, and even on his va.s.sals, (it would not expressly contradict the Recesses,) than the attending the national university. In this Lodge, now, I have placed the extraordinary pond better known by the name of the East Indian Ocean, and into which we, of Scheerau, have steered and moored the few Moluccas and other islands on which our productive business lies. While the invisible lodge was being transformed by the press into a visible one, we again prepared an island,--namely, the isle of _St. John's_, on which I now live and write.

The following digression ought to be attractive, because it discloses to the reader why I prefixed to this book the crazy t.i.tle, Dog-post-days.

It was day before yesterday, on the 29th of April, that I was walking in the evening up and down my island. The evening had already spun itself into haze and shadow. I could hardly see over to Tidore Island,[18] that monument of fair, sunken spring-times, and my eye glanced round only on the near buddings of twig and blossom, those wing-casings of growing Spring,--the plain and coast around me looked like a tiring-room of the flower-G.o.ddess, and her finery lay scattered and hid in vales and bushes round about,--the moon lay as yet behind the earth, but the well-spring of her rays shot up already along the whole rim of heaven,--the blue sky was at length pierced with silver spangles, but the earth was still painted black by the night. I was looking only at the heavens,--when something plashed on the earth....

It was a little Pomeranian dog, who had leaped into the Indian Ocean, and was now heading full for St. John's. He crawled up on my coast and rained a shower of drops as he waggled near me. With a dog who is an utter stranger, it is still more disagreeable undertaking to spin a conversation than with an Englishman, because one knows neither the character nor the name of the animal. The dog had some business with me, and seemed to be a plenipotentiary. At last the moon opened her sluices of radiance, and brought me and the dog into full light.

"_To his Well-Born_, _Superintendent of Mines_,[19] _Mr. Jean Paul_, _on_ _Free_. _St. John's_."

This address to me hung down from the neck of the animal, and was pasted to a gourd-bottle which was tied to his collar. The dog consented to my taking off his iron collar, as the Alpine dogs do their portable refectory-table. I extracted from the bottle, which in sutlers' tents had often been filled with spirit, something which intoxicated me still better,--a package of letters. _Savans_, lovers, people of leisure, and maidens are pa.s.sionately sharp-set upon letters; business-people, not at all.

The whole package (name and hand were strange to me) turned upon the one point, to wit, that I was a famous man, and had intercourse with kings and emperors;[20] and that there were few mining intendants of my stamp, etc. But enough! For I must needs not have an ounce of modesty left in me if, with the impudence which some really possess, I should go on excerpting and extracting from the letters, that I was the Gibbon and the Moser[21] of Scheerau, (to be sure only in the biographical department, but then what flattery!)--that every one who possessed a life, and would see it biographically delineated by me, should set about the matter at once, before I was pressed away by some royal house as its historiographer, and could absolutely no longer be had,--that it might occur in my case as in that of other mine-intendants, before whom often the deluded public never took off its hat, until they had already pa.s.sed into another lane,[22] i. e. world, etc. Who apprehends this last more than myself? But even this apprehension does not bring a modest man to the point of lowering himself down to be the bellows-blower to the man that shall sound his eulogy; as I to be sure should have done, if I had gone on to lay myself entirely bare. To my feeling even those authors are odious, who, in their shamelessness, only _then_ bring up the rear with the final flourish, that _modesty forbids them to say more_, when they have already said everything that modesty _can_ forbid.

At length my correspondent ventures out with his design, namely, to make me the compiler of an unnamed family history. He begs, he intrigues, he defies. "He is able,"--he writes more copiously, but I abridge all, and in fact I deliver this epistolary extract with uncommonly little understanding; for I have been this half-hour scratched and gnawed in an unusually exasperating manner by a cursed beast of a rat,--"to establish everything for me by doc.u.mentary evidence, but is not allowed to communicate to me any other names of the personages in this history than fict.i.tious ones, because I am not wholly to be trusted,--in time he will explain everything to me,--for this is a history upon which and its development destiny itself is still working, and what he hands over to me is only the snout thereof, but he will duly make over to me one member after another, just as it falls off from the lathe of time, until we get the tail;--accordingly the epistolary _Spitz_ will regularly swim back and forth as a _poste aux anes_,[23] but I must not on any account sail after the postman; and thus," concludes the correspondent, who signs himself _Knef_, "shall the dog, as a Pegasus, bring me so much nutritious sap, that, instead of the thin Forget-me-not of an annual, I may rear a thick cabbage-head or cauliflower of folios."

How successfully he has accomplished his purpose the reader knows, who is fresh from the first chapter of this story, which, from Eymann's rats to the cannonade complete, was all in Spitz's bottle.

I wrote back to Mr. Knef in the gourd only so much as this: "Anything nonsensical I seldom decline. Your flatteries would make me proud if I were not so already; hence, flatteries harm me little. I find the best world to be contained in the mere microcosm, and my Arcadia stretches not beyond the four chambers of my brain; the Present is made for nothing but the maw of man; the Past consists of history, which, again, is an aggregate present peopled by the dead, and a mere _Declinatorium_[24] of our perpetual _horizontal_ deviations from the cold pole of truth, and an _Inclinatorium_[25] of our _vertical_ ones from the sun of virtue. There is left, therefore, to man, who wants to be happier in than out of himself, nothing but the Future, or fancy, that is, romance. Now, as a biography is easily exalted into a romance by skilful hands, as we see by Voltaire's 'Charles' and his 'Peter,'

and by autobiographies, I undertake the biographical work, on condition that in it the truth shall be only my maid of honor, but not my guide.

"In visiting-parlors one makes one's self odious by general satires, because every one can take them to himself; personal ones they set down as among the duties of _medisance_, and so pardon them, because they hope the satirist is attacking the person rather than the vice. In books, however, it is exactly the reverse, and to me, in case several or more knaves, as I hope, play parts in our biography, their _incognito_ is a quite pleasing feature. A satirist is not so unfortunate herein as a physician. A lively medical author can describe few maladies which some lively reader shall not think he himself has; he inoculates the hypochondriac by his historical patients with their pains as thoroughly as if he put him to bed with a real attack of them; and I am firmly convinced that few people of rank can read living descriptions of the unclean disease without imagining they have it, so weak are their nerves and so strong their fancies, whereas a satirist can cherish the hope that a reader will seldom apply to himself his pictures of moral maladies, his anatomical tables of spiritual abortions; he can freely and cheerily depict despotism, imbecility, pride, and folly, without the least apprehension that any one will fancy himself to have anything of the kind; nay, I can charge the whole public, or all Germans, with an aesthetic lethargy, a political enervation, a politico-economical phlegma towards everything which does not go into the stomach or the purse; but I rely upon every one who reads me, that he at least will not reckon himself in the number, and if this letter were printed, I would appeal to every one's inner witness. The only performer whose true name I must have in this historical drama--especially as he plays only the prompter--is the--Dog. JEAN PAUL."

I have, as yet, got no answer, nor any second chapter; so now it depends wholly on the Dog whether he will present the sequel of this History to the learned world or not.

But is it possible that a biographical mining intendant, merely for the sake of a cursed rat, who, besides, is not working at any journal, but only in my house, must just run away from the public and thunder through all rooms, to worry the carrion to death?...

... _Spitzius Hofmann_ is the name of the dog; _he_ was the rat, and was scratching at the door with the second chapter in the flask. A whole crammed provisionship, which the learned world may nibble at have I taken off from Hofmann's neck; and now the reader, who loves to read wise things as well as stupid ones, shall have opened to him to-day--for henceforth it is certain that I shall go on with my writing--glad prospects which, from a certain feeling of modesty, I do not designate.... The reader sits now on his sofa, the fairest reading-Hours dance round him and hide from him his repeating-watch,--the Graces hold my book for him and hand to him the sheets,--the Muses turn over the leaves for him, or in fact read it all to him;--he has nothing to disturb him, but the Swiss or the children must say, "Papa is out." As life has on one foot a sock and on the other a buskin, he loves to have a biography laugh and weep in one breath; and as the fine writers always understand how to combine with the useful moral of their writings a something immoral which poisons, but charms,--like the apothecaries, who draw at once _medicines_ and _aqua vitae_,--so does he willingly forgive me, in consideration of the immoral which is prominent, the religious quality which I sometimes have, and _vice versa_; and as this biography is set to music, because Ramler sets it beforehand into hexameter (which it certainly needs far more than Gessner's harmonious prose[26]), he can, when he has done reading, stand up and play or sing it.... I, too, am almost as happy as if I read the work;--the Indian Ocean flings up the peac.o.c.k-wheels of its illuminated circle of waves before my island,--I stand on the best footing with all, the Reader, the Reviewer, and the Dog;--everything is ready to hand with each Dog-post-day: a recipe for ink from an alchemist; the gooseherd with quills was here day before yesterday; the bookbinder with gay writing-books only to-day: nature buds, my body blooms, my mind produces,--and so I hang my blossoms over the tan-bed and forcing-bed (i. e. over the island), send my root-fibres through the soil, unable (Hamadryad that I am) to guess from my foliage how much moss years may collect on my bark, how many woodchafers the future may gather upon the pith of my heart, and how many tree-lifters Death may lay under my roots,--nothing of all this do I surmise, but swing joyfully--thou good destiny!--my boughs in the wind, lay my suckling leaves to the bosom of a Nature filled with light and dew, and, with the breath of universal life fluttering through me, stir up as much articulate noise as is necessary, that one or another sad human heart, while contemplating these _leaves_, may forget, in short, gentle dreams, its stings, its throbbings, its stiflings----O, why is a man sometimes so happy?

For this reason: because he is sometimes a _litterateur_. As often as Fate, under its veil, dots off from the great world atlas to a special map the little life-stream of a _literatus_, which runs over some lecture-halls and bookshelves, it may possibly think and say thus: "Surely there is no cheaper or rarer way of making a creature happy than by making him a literary one: his goblet of joy is an inkhorn,--his feast of trumpets and carnival is (if he is a reviewer) the Easter-fair,--his whole Paphian grove is compressed into a bookcase,--and what else do his blue Mondays consist of than (written or read) Dog-post-days?" And so Fate itself leads me over to the

2. DOG-POST-DAY.

Antediluvian History.--Victor's Plan of Life.

At the gate of the First Chapter, the readers ask the incomers: "What is your name?--your character?--your business?"

The Dog answers for all: H. Januarius--i. e. Herr Januarius, not Holy Januarius; but the Prince of Flachsenfingen bore that name--had, in his younger years, made the grand tour or journey round the beautiful and the great world. He everywhere distributed gifts to strangers, which cost him but a single _don gratuit_ from his subjects, and he succored and pitied many oppressed peasants in France, who fared as badly as his own did in Flachsenfingen. For the defenceless female s.e.x, like all travelling princes, he did, if possible, still more; one may say of the greater number of them, that, like t.i.tus, or like one sailing westward round the world, they, to be sure, sometimes lose a _day_, but seldom a _night_, without making others, and consequently being themselves, happy. In fact, the Regent must have foreseen the present depopulation of France; for he took measures betimes against it, and left behind him in three Gallic seaboard cities three sons, and on the so-called Seven Islands only one. The first was called the Welshman, the second the Brazilian, the third the Calabrian; the one on the Seven Islands, the Monsieur, or _Mosye_: these names were probably meant to allude to Princes of Wales, Brazil, and Asturias. He let his children grow up in no worse ignorance than ignorance of their rank: they were to be formed for future co-workers in his administration. Januarius was, to be sure, sensual and somewhat feeble, but--except where he _feared_--extremely philanthropic.

Lord Horion met Prince January twice on his journeys: the first time he cut across the princely planetary orbit as a comet, in the sense of a hairy star; the second, as a comet with a tail when in its perihelion.

What I mean is this: it was just when Horion was in love with a scion of January's house, who lived in London, that he saw the Prince for the second time, and at his house in London entertained him and his court.

Upon this very distant relative of the Prince my papers--from an excessive deference to political and domestic relations--throw an unseasonable veil. She was, at the time of marrying his Lordship, twenty-two years old, and her whole person was (if I may venture to adopt the bold expression of a London eulogist) nothing but a single, tender, still blue eye. That is all which is vouchsafed to the public.

The Prince willingly let himself be mastered and managed--by the lord, whom a singular mixture of coldness and genius const.i.tuted an unlimited monarch and commander of souls. The lord had, moreover, a beautiful niece in his house, whose charms in princes' eyes made such a spiritual Old Man of the Mountain as he at once _younger_ and more _smooth_.

But the death-bell threw its discords into these harmonies of life. The beloved of his Lordship fled from the rough earth, and left behind her his first-born son as a memorial, and pledge of love; she died in her twenty-third year, as it were of the life of her child, some days after its birth, and the thin, tender twig broke down under the ripe fruit.

Lord Horion bowed silently to fate. He had loved her terribly, without showing it: he mourned her in the same manner, without moistening his deep black eye.

The Prince found in the niece, i. e. in a true Englishwoman, something to his taste, for the reason that he _had_ found what was still more so in the Frenchwomen; and on this ground he would, inversely, have loved them, had he previously known her. The subsequent Chief Chamberlain, Le Baut, had the same sentiments, and, what is still more, toward the same person; and as Indian courtiers imitate all wounds of their sovereign, so did Le Baut with an arrow of Cupid copy those of his master, and transferred to himself therewith one of the severest.

These London histories cannot last much longer, and then we shall happily get back again to our St. Luna.

A burning fever seized the Regent, which his physician, Dr. Culpepper, held to be merely zigzag dartings of fitful, gouty matter. I have been unable, hitherto, to ascertain whether this Culpepper has any tolerably near relationship to his well-known namesake and professional co-master in London. The fever hunted January so hard, and the Father Confessor inst.i.tuted with his conscience, instead of extinguishing processes, so many incendiary ones, that in the agony of death he took a solemn oath never again at the sight of a maiden to think of Depopulation and Revolution. The same weakness which strengthened his superst.i.tion and childlike credulity ministered to his sensuality; when he was up again, he absolutely knew not what to do. The niece and his oath were next-door neighbors in the chambers of his brain. A clever ex-Jesuit from Ireland, who lived only for doubts of conscience, and had himself a _conscientia dubia_, flew to the help of the doubter, and gave him to understand that "his vow, especially before getting absolution from it, he must conscientiously keep, excepting the sinful and impossible point therein, that, namely, which, without the consent of his spouse, he had neither the right to promise nor the power to fulfil." In other words, the Jesuit failed not to show him, that he had in his fever sworn off only from the _unmarried_ s.e.x, and limited his celibacy merely to nuns, that accordingly his vow did not, to be sire, forbid him compound adultery, (which confession would do away) but it did with extreme strictness the simple kind. January was too religious not to refrain wholly from the simple form.

It is hard to investigate the relation in which his now _increased_ love for his four grand dukes or _little_ dukes in Gaul stood to the fulfilment of his vow; in short, he gave his Lordship the commission and full power to fetch the four little persons from Gaul to London, because he wanted to take his beloved anonymous little posterity with him to Germany. It was uncertain whether he loved the mothers so heartily for the children's sake, or the children for the sake of the mothers. His Lordship went gladly, like Kotzebue (but differently), after the death of his beloved, to France. At last there came, not from him, but from the tutors of the Welshman, the Brazilian, the Calabrian, the sad intelligence, that in one night, probably according to a concerted plan of conspired prince-stealers, the three children had been abducted; and not long after that the sorrowful post was not only confirmed by his Lordship, but aggravated by the new one, that the Monsieur or Mosye on the Seven Islands was no more--to be found there.