From Peoples' Magazine.

HERE is always a thick curtain of

of captive princes. The kings and queens of this world must be born and must die in public, or no one will believe that this "mortal coil" has been put on or put off satisfactorily. The crowned head lies uneasily and unsafely even in its grave; it is liable to be exhumed, literally or figuratively, whenever the world takes a fancy for such an ultra-postmortem examination. Many a verbal battle has been fought over the bones of our own young Edward V. and his brother, the young prisoners of the Tower! But not half so many as over the fate of Louis XVII. of France.

For many years, the death of the little Bourbon king was regarded as a fact no less undoubted than it was deplorable; but recent investigations "compel us," as Sir L. Wraxall, in his "Unexplained Mysteries," says, to acknowledge that it is not perfectly demonstrated that Louis XVII. actually did die in the place and at the time usually stated, namely, at Paris-in the prison called the Temple-on the 8th of June, 1795."

Now, the facts actually known are simply these. The body of a child, apparently about ten years of age, was examined by MM. Dumangin, Pelletan, Crannoy, and Lassus. This body, they were told by the Commissaries, was that of "Louis Capet."

Their deposition is that the child in question had scrofulous disease of long standing. There was a tumor on the right knee, containing matter such as is found in scrofulous swellings; and another on the left wrist of the same kind. No other swellings of the joints. The stomach, heart, lungs, and liver were all extensively diseased from long-continued scrofula. But the brain was perfectly healthy.

The body was immediately buried, in a coffin filled up with quicklime, within the burial-ground attached to the prison.

The testimony of four eminent surgeons is conclusive as to the cause of death; but, as none of them had ever seen the Dauphin alive, it is of no value as an identification of the body.

In order to put the reader in a position to form a judgment for himself on this point, it is necessary to go back to the date of the imprisonment of the royal family, and to describe minutely the place of their confinement.

On the 13th of August, 1792, the King Louis XVI. and his family were sent to the Temple. This prison, originally built by the Knights Templars, in A. D. 1200, consisted of a massive square tower, with a small circular one at each corner. The building was one hundred and fifty-six feet high; the walls nine feet thick. The internal arrangements were as follows:

There were four stories. A large central pillar passed up through the building, mounting as high as the floor of the fourth story. The space inclosed within the walls was thirty-six feet square. The ground floor and the apartments in three of the small circular towers or turrets were inhabited by the municipal officers in charge of the prisoners. The fourth round tower contained a spiral staircase, running from the bottom to the top of the building. The first story, of the same extent as the ground floor, contained the guard, who stacked their arms round the central column. The second story was divided into four rooms. In these were lodged the King, the Dauphin, and their attendants. There was a central stove, which warmed the four chambers. In the third story, which was similarly divided, resided the Queen and the other women. The fourth story, having no central pillar, formed a vast, open hall; and, with the gallery which opened from it, and ran round the top of the tower outside, was used for exercise.

It has been casually mentioned that the stairs leading from one floor of the prison to another were in one of the cir cular towers which were at the corners of the main building. Each story had a landing-place secured by two doors; one of oak, and one of iron. It was evidently easy for any one on the ground floor to communicate with the inhabitants of any one story without the knowledge of those living on any other.

At the time the imprisonment commenced, the child was in good health. The King's execution took place on the 21st of January, 1793. Soon after that time the Dauphin's health began to give way. He had fever-pain in the side and general debility, the not unnatural consequence of the change in his mode of life, and the distress and terror which even a child of his tender years could not fail to suffer in such disastrous circumstances.

Up to the 3d of June his mother continued to take charge of him. After that date they were separated; but she saw him occasionally, when he went to take exercise at the top of the tower.

There is no use in going over again the well-known and heart-rending account of the terrible sufferings-the mental and bodily degradation-which the unhappy Dauphin experienced at the hands of his cruel gaolers. Only one eircumstance is it necessary to mention, as reference will afterwards be nade to it. The poor child was wounded on the brow, in consequence of being struck on the face with a towel, to which a nail had accidentally been attached.

After the brutal Simon and his wife were removed from their charge, the poor child lived alone, in a small room formerly occupied by Clery, his father's valet. There was only one window, situated in a deep recess, the little light which could have entered being obscured by thick iron bars. In this miserable

place-seeing no one kind face, never hearing a friendly voice, scantily clothed, tadly fed, without air or exercise, almost without light-the helpless, hopeless little creature spent six months.

What has been truly termed the Reign of Terror came to an end at last. Public opinion, both in France and throughout Europe, was clamorous on the subject of the poor prisoner, whose only crime seemed to be that he was the son of a king. The door of his cell was opened, and a piteous sight presented itself. A child, reduced almost to a skeleton, covered with filth of every kind, breathing feebly, trembling occasionally, but making no voluntary movement. His widelyopened eyes were lustreless and almost colorless. His knees and elbows were covered with tumors.

They spoke to him, but he did not seem to hear. He was apparently an idiot. No time was lost in calling in medical aid. Desault, who had formerly attended the royal family, was sent for.

He did not, at first, despair of the case. He said that the prince had in him the germ of the disease which had carried off his elder brother, viz., scrofula, but that it had not decidedly set its seal on the constitution. The child was suffering from want of air, insufficient food, and general neglect. The swellings were not scrofulous. He expressed doubts as to the state of the mental faculties; but the bodily condition was far from hopeless. This opinion was pronounced on the 6th of May. Up to the 30th of the same month Desault visited the child frequently. On that day, for the first time, he expressed fears as to the result. Two days after, Desault himself died, and on the 8th of June a child, said to be the son of the late king, expired in the presence of two gaolers, named Lasne and Gonin.

Thus far we have actually ascertained facts before us. Now begin tradition and conjecture. It was whispered among the Royalist party that the real Dauphin had escaped from the Temple, and that the child whose body MM. Pelletan and Dumangin opened after death, and whom they had visited for a couple of days previous to his decease, was one brought from the Hotel Dieu, and substituted for the little prince. There was also a rumor that, on the occasion of Desault's last visit, he had expressed to his friend, the apothecary Choppard, a doubt whether the child he now saw was the same as the one he had been called in to see.

Desault, as has been mentioned, died on the first of June, and Choppard on the 9th of same month-the one seven days before, and the other the day after the decease of the child in the Temple; and suspicions were rife that means had been taken to remove the only persons whose testimony could have settled the question of identity.

Amidst all this maze of uncertainty there stand out two remarkable facts:

1. The child in the Temple died, as has been already mentioned, on June 8, 1795. On that very night an order was given to the police of Paris to arrest any travelers bearing with them a boy of nine years old or thereabouts, as there had been an escape of Royalists from the Temple. This order still exists in the archives of the police.

2. There is extant a proclamation of Charrette, the general of the army in La Vendee, bearing date some time towards the close of the year 1795, in

which he speaks of the young King Louis the XVII. as being then in his

camp.

"Will you," says he, "abandon to the caprice of fortune the royal orphan whom you swore to defend? Will you conduct him to the assassins of his father, and cast at their feet the head of your innocent king?"

That there was in the Vendean camp a child who was shown to the army as being the son of Louis XVI. is certain, but what became of him is a mystery. Some suppose that, either from his pretensions becoming doubtful, or from his turning out a hopeless idiot, (which, if he really were the little prisoner of the Temple, he was likely enough to be,) his presence became embarrassing, and he was quietly sent away out of the country. There was a report that he had gone to America. The memoirs of the Duchesse d'Angouleme show that she was aware of this latter rumor. It is even asserted that she believed her brother to be in that country; but his imbecility rendering him incapable of reigning, she steadily discouraged all attempts to bring forward one whose presence in France would disturb the public mind, without any possible_good result. It is also stated that Louis XVIII. procured a certificate of the death of his unfortunate nephew in a foreign land. One thing is very certain : from time to time youths were brought forward, severally claiming to be the son of Louis, King of France, and Marie Antoinette, Archduchess of Austria. As early as the year 1798, as late as within the last ten years, it has been asserted and re-asserted that the rightful heir of the Bourbons was yet alive. These pretenders were five in numberHervagault, Bruneau, Naundorff, Hebert, and Williams. A very brief notice of the first four will suffice.

He

1. JEAN-MARIE HERVAGAULT.-His claim was put forward in 1798. was the son (real or adopted) of a tailor in the village of Basse-Los. He had much of the Bourbon countenance, and his story at first was believed by the gentry of his native province. He was convicted of swindling, at Rheims, in

*It was the partisans of Hervaganlt who first called attention to the fact, that the surgeons who opened the body acknowledged their inability to certify that it was that of the Dauphin, and to the extraordinary discrepancy between the statement. of Desault and the condition of the dead child: Desault declaring that the Dauphin was not scrofulous: the post-mortem examination testifying to scrofula of many years' standing.

1802, and was imprisoned for four years. After that time, having shown symptoms of insanity, he was by order of Napoleon, shut up in the Bicetre, where he died in 1812.

2. MATHURIN BRUNEAU-Son (real or adopted) of a wooden-clog maker, born in 1784. Gave himself out as the Dauphin in 1815. Two years after was imprisoned as a rogue and vagabond. He was confined in Mont St. Michel for seven years. On his release, he resumed his original trade. The date of his death is uncertain. The only remarkable feature of his case was that he certainly had passed some of his early years in America, where it had been at one time generally believed that the prince, if alive, was concealed.

3. NAUNDORFF.-Watchmaker. Claim first brought forward in 1812. His story was very circumstantial, but rather involved. His escape, it was said, was contrived by the Empress Josephine, and, whereas in all the other cases there was said to have been one boy substituted for the young prince, Naundorff's partisans assert that there were twofirst, a dumb boy of scrofulous constitution, who was supposed to be in a dying state, but whom the good food and gentle treatment ordered by the physician, Desault, restored to a very inconvenient degree of health. (It will be remembered by those who have read the usual account of the Dauphin's imprisonment, that he rallied for a time as far as bodily strength was concerned, but continued obstinately silent.)

The dumb boy not dying, as he was expected and wished to do, he was smuggled out of the prison by the convenient tower-stair, and another child brought in from the Hotel Dieu. This boy was so obliging as to do what was required, and it was he for whom Pelletan and Dumangin prescribed, and whose body they opened after his death. Naundorff, if he was not what he pretended to be, had got up his case well. His so-called recollections of his early days were precisely what would have been natural under the circumstances. His knowledge of the localities of the prison was minute. His resemblance to Louis XVI. was stronger than that of any other pretender except Eleazar Williams. Naundorff had numerous partisans both in and out of France, and many persons believe in him to this day. He had the hardihood to request an interview with the Duchesse d'An

gouleme, which she refused to grant. This was in 1834. He then came to London, where he remained some time. Finally he settled at Delft in Holland, where he died in 1845. The King of Holland favored Naundorff's pretensions so far as to allow of his having a rather pompous funeral under his selfasserted name and title. A harmless piece of patronage.

4. HENRI-ETHELBERT-LOUIS-HECTOR HEBERT was almost a contemporary of Naundorff. He assumed the title of "Baron de Richemont et Duc de Normandie." He publicly presented petitions to the Chambers, asserting his claim to be recognized as the son of Louis XVI. Louis XVIII. is said to have received him kindly. He suceeeded, by stratagem, in obtaining an interview with the Duchesse d'Angouleme. She declared he was an impostor. He meddled in Austrian politics, and was imprisoned for many years. Escaping from captivity, he came to England, where he long lived quietly, and where he died. His death took place, like Naundorff's, in 1845.

The French Government had not been indifferent to the agitation which had prevailed on the subject of these pretended dauphins. As long as they could be spoken of in the plural number, however, they were not really formidable. Each one employed himself in invalidating his rivals' claims. Nevertheless, it seemed desirable to set the question

at rest if possible. In the year 1852 was published, with the authorization of the Government, a long and careful examination into the stories of all these pretenders, and contained what it was supposed must be conclusive evidence of the death of the Dauphin in the Temple, namely, that of Lasne and Gonin, the two gaolers in whose arms the little prisoner died. The book is a very interesting one, and very lengthy -two thick volumes. It convinced all who wished to believe the statements it contained, and that is all that can be expected of any book or anybody. Those whose will was unsubdued remarked that the extraordinary intelligence shown by the dying child was difficult to reconcile with Desault's opinion of the state of the Dauphin's brain: it will be remembered that the physician considered the child's intellect to have given way under the pressure of his suffering. Still, the general world believed that M. de Beauchesne had set the question at rest forever. But, in a very short time after the publication of the French official statement, came one from America to the effect that the much-talked-of Dauphin was still alive in that country, bearing the unromantic name of Eleazar Williams, and following (of all unlikely professions) that of a missionary of the American Episcopal Church.

The story of this trans-Atlantic dauphin is a very curious one. It may form the subject of a future paper.

ORIGIN OF MAHOGANY FURNITURE.A West India Captain, about the beginning of the eighteenth century, had brought some logs of it as ballast for his ship, and gave them to his brother, Dr. Gibbons, an eminent physician, who was then building a house. The wood was thrown aside as too hard for the workmen's tools. Sometime afterward his wife wanted a candle-box. The docor thought of the West India wood, and out of that the box was made. color and polish tempted the doctor to have a bureau made of the same material, and this was thought so beautiful that it was shown to all his friends. The Duchess of Buckingham, who went to look at it, begged wood enough to make another bureau for herself. Then the demand arose for more, and Honduras mahogany became a common article of trade.-Dickens' All the Year Round.

Its

THE WIT OF THE YOUNGSTERS. "Mamma, mamma," cried a little boy, when the sun set gorgeously red one Christmas eve, 66 see how hot heaven is over there. Santa Claus is baking, I guess." In manner somewhat like did one of these natural philosophers account for another phenomenon. Hearing a man dump coal in the bin one day with a terrible rumbling, he shouted: "Oh, mother, now I know what makes thunder. It is God putting coal on." Children are great realists, interpreting things in the most literal sense. the infantile mind the beautiful metaphor of the Lord walking in the garden in the cool of the day conveys the idea of a tangible presence. "I know," said a little boy to whom the passage was read: "Just as papa does, with his hands behind him, and an old coat on." - Hours at Home.

To

THE

HE invention of the telegraph marks an era in modern civilization. There had been many devices employed to transmit intelligence by signals more rapidly than could be done by any known methods of locomotion. But the application of the electric current by the Morse telegraph, by which time and space are annihilated in transmitting messages, was a stride in the progress of the race unequaled in the world's history. And though there have been improvements on the original plan, and the system itself is by no means perfect and admits of still further improvement, yet the primal idea of transmitting thought around the globe with the speed of lightning cannot be improved by any subsequent invention. And great as are the results already achieved by the telegraph, the important part it is to play in the future is yet but imperfectly comprehended, It has already changed, and is changing still more, the whole course of human affairs. In our late war, vast armies were guided, battles fought and victories won, by its agency. And, in connection with railroads-power to direct by lightning, and move by steam, large armies-it must make wars between civilized nations of short duration, and tend mightily to the preservation of peace.

In the commercial world, too, how great the changes it has wrought! The business of weeks and months is compressed into seconds of time. The markets of the world are spread out simultaneously to the people of both hemispheres, and the changes of values made known at once to whole nations living as wide asunder as the poles.

So of general news. It gathers up and conveys, through the press, to every

family, far and near, the tidings of the most important events that take place throughout the globe. Not a discovery is made, nor an invention wrought, nor a thought generated which promises good to man, but it catches it up, in ten thousand currents, and spreads the knowledge of it, like sun-light, to all the people. If a revolution breaks out in Spain, or an insurrection in Cuba; if war is imminent in Turkey, or the peace of Europe is threatened by Napoleon; if a steamer explodes on lake or river, or a rail-car leaps from the iron way bearing its precious burden to danger and death; if fire ravages a city or village, or frost or drouth lays waste the fields; if famine devours, or pestilence destroys, or health and plenty make glad the people; whatever of human interest takes place in any quarter of the globe, on the land or on the sea, or is rapped out by spirits from heaven or hell, the telegraph faithfully heralds the news alike to rich and poor, and spreads before them two worlds in miniature-the world of matter and the world of mind. And when a great thought, uttered in the pulpit, or the forum, or the legislative hall, goes kindling and burning along the electric wires, like lightning which shineth from one end of heaven to the other, the press seizes and embodies it, and indues it with the life and power of immortality, and, sending it forth on myriad wings, makes it stir the souls of men the earth throughout, and live in the memory of mankind forever.

The effect of thus bringing the ends of the earth into close neighborhood has been to revolutionize the old modes of business, quicken thought, and give a mighty impulse to every enterprise.