remarkable old gentleman, or rather, the
remarkable old gentleman made my
acquaintance, and confided to me the secret
of his birth, parentage, education, and very
modest pretensions. He was a very high
personage, according to his story; but did
not aim at high fortune, or at anything, in
fact, except to be let alone. I was at the
time temporarily resident in a great and
populous city of the New World, which its
inhabitants call Gotham, and which I shall
call Gotham here. What took me to
Gotham I need not tell. Suffice it to say
that I was very well known in the city,
and had the annoyance, perhaps if all the
truth were known, it was the honour, of
being often and very unjustly attacked in
the columns of more than one of the
Gothamite journals. In short I was for
the time being the best abused Englishman
in Gotham; and my name and business
were familiar to thousands of people of
whom I knew nothing, nor cared to know
anything. It was a hot, a very hot, day in
July, when there walked into my office,
entirely unannounced, a venerable gentleman
with long white hair, and a countenance
so full of dignity and nobility of
expression, that it would have excited
attention anywhere. He was very careful
to shut the door behind him, and seeing a
young man in the room with me, he asked
(looking very suspiciously around him)
whether he could speak to me in private?
It was a time when men's political passions
were violently excited, and it especially
behoved me to be on my guard, lest the
Gothamite journals in their attacks on me
with pen and ink, should inspire some
lunatic, or some ruffian, with the happy
idea of attacking me with a revolver. But
this man was so old and so pleasant looking,
that I had no other fear of him than that
he had come to wheedle some dollars from
my pocket. So I led him into my inner
sanctum, and asked him to sit down, and
tell me his name and business. He sat down,
but not before making sure that the door
was closed. I could not help gazing at him
rather more earnestly than was quite
consistent with good manners, by reason of
his striking resemblance to the statue of
Charles the Second in Edinburgh, which
had long been familiar to my memory, and
of the very picturesque character of his
noble head and forehead. He was clad in
a suit of home-spun blue; wore very thick-
soled shoes, that did not appear to have
been blackened for many a day; and had
economically turned up the ends of his
trousers, to prevent their contact with the
mud. He carried a serviceable blackthorn
stick in his hard right hand: a hand that
bore the undoubted marks of manual
drudgery; he had a gold chain of antique
fashion, hanging from the antique fob, now
so seldom seen: and had altogether the air
of a well-to-do farmer in a rough country,
where people are accustomed to hard work,
and are not particularly nice, either in dress
or manners.

"My name," he said, "is of no consequence.
My real name I do not care to
call myself by—there's danger in it; but I
am known to my neighbours as Mr.——"
(let us say Blank).

"Well, Mr. Blank, is there anything I
can do for you?"

"Much," he replied; "but I must warn
you, that to do me a service is to incur
danger, very great danger; and you shall
not incur it, until you know who I am.
Shall I tell you? Or are you afraid?"

"You may tell me; and I am not
afraid," I replied, beginning to feel additional
interest in my mysterious visitor.

"I will go right into the matter at once,"
he said. "Look at me. I am the son of
Charles Edward Stuart, who was lawful
King of England, Scotland, and Ireland,
and was commonly and unjustly called the
Pretender: a man who never pretended to
be what he was not, or to the possession
of anything but his own."

I certainly did start when Mr. Blank
uttered these words; even if I did not rub
my eyes to be quite certain that I was not
asleep and dreaming. Being quite certain
that I was awake, I looked incredulous,
and replied:

"Surely, Mr. Blank, you cannot be the
son of a man who died nearly eighty years
ago?"

"Why not?" he inquired. "Besides,
it is not nearly so long ago that my father
died!"

"He died," I rejoined, "somewhere
about the year 1788, being then, if my
memory does not deceive me, about sixty-
eight years of age. He was born, I think,
in 1720?"

"He was," replied Mr. Blank; "you are
quite right as to his birth: quite wrong as
to his death. The truth is, he was the
object of such persistent and cold-blooded
persecution on the part of the British
government, that a false story of his death
was circulated in 1788; and he emigrated
to the New World, in order to pass in
peace the remainder (Mr. Blank, being an