POLICE records show how easy it is for a man in any of our great cities to drop as completely out of sight as if he had never existed. Usually the missing person, comparatively obscure before, is either put down as the victim of foul play, or the mystery of his disappearance is forgotten with the coming of some new wonder. In many cases, however, so strange have been the circumstances or so prominent the actors that the incidents cannot readily be passed over.

      About sixteen years ago the Austrian Government searched the world in vain for a member of the Imperial House of Hapsburg — an archduke and a possible heir to the throne. Despite persistent rumors that he had been seen in various parts of the world, he was never found by those who sought him. He had previously abandoned his birthright, and his final disappearance was the last act in one of many romantic episodes in the domestic history of the great Hapsburg family.

      While picnicking in the woods near Vienna in the summer of 1886, a poor Viennese, named Stubel, and his family were startled by a charge of shot which tore through the trees above their heads. They screamed, and a minute later a man in sportsman's dress appeared to apologize for his carelessness. Introducing himself as Johann Orth, a civil engineer, he made himself so agreeable that he was soon regarded by the Stubels as a close friend. In a very short time, indeed, the engagement was announced of the good-looking, pleasant-mannered engineer, a man of thirty-four, and Milly Stubel, the eldest daughter, a singularly beautiful girl, with an unblemished reputation, who was engaged as a dancer in the Vienna Opera House.

      Then Orth said that as he had made some money in his profession recently Milly could afford to leave the stage. Although the family consented readily enough to this, Frau Stubel's suspicions were in some way aroused and she proceeded to investigate. No Johann Orth lived at the place to which they had been told to send letters, and no one there knew of any such person.

A Startling Recognition.

      Believing herself the victim of some trick, Milly was in despair. A few days later, happening to be with her mother among the spectators of a great review of the troops in Vienna, she saw ride by at the head of the column the Archduke Johann, field-marshal and nephew of the emperor. With a cry the girl fell to the ground. In the prince in front of her the former dancing-girl had recognized her fiancé, the obscure civil engineer.

      Milly and her mother at once secured an interview with the archduke. He listened calmly to their reproaches that he had deluded Milly with the idea that she could ever be his wife. Then he turned to the mother.

      "I shall marry Milly very soon," he said.

      This assertion he made to every member of the imperial family, who pleaded with him to remember his rank and the possibility that he might some day be emperor himself. With the emperor, old Franz Joseph himself. the archduke had an interview memorable among all the stormy scenes that similar romances in the Hapsburg family have caused. The upshot was that Johann persisted in his determination to marry the girl, though, in order to do so, he was forced to give up all claim to be considered longer a member of the House of Hapsburg, to abandon all pretensions to the throne, and even to surrender his Austrian citizenship.

      For some reason the marriage was put off for two years, but Johann's punishment began immediately. He was dismissed from his command in the army and placed on the retired list. One more member of the imperial family was in disgrace.

      In 1890 the archduke, now a man without title or country, married in London the dancer of the opera house. Almost immediately after the wedding the archduke sailed for Buenos Ayres in the sailing-ship St. Margarethe, which he had recently purchased. His bride met him in South America. Together they sailed in July from Buenos Ayres, bound for Valparaiso. They rounded Cape Horn and appeared in a little port in South Chile.

      After the St. Margarethe left this harbor no one ever saw her or any of her crew. Archduke Johann, of the Imperial House of Austria, his wife, the Viennese dancer, and twenty-five sailors vanished from the earth. From time to time it was reported that Johann had been recognized in one place or another. Detectives were sent from Vienna to run the clues down, but the fate of the archduke and his bride remains a mystery.

Roger Tichborne's Fate.

      Far below the archduke in station, but destined by his disappearance to become no less celebrated, was Roger Tichborne, the son of an English country gentleman. Born in Paris in 1829, Roger was allowed by his mother, a French woman apparently of a very disagreeable temperament, to grow up in ignorance until he was about sixteen years of age. Then his father insisted on his going to an English public school and later obtained for him a commission in the army. Although an attempt was afterward made to paint Roger as an oaf and a drunkard, he seems to have been an average young Englishman, who, about this time, fell violently in love with his cousin.

      The father of the young woman refused to permit the marriage for three years, and in 1853 Roger sailed for Valparaiso. For more than a year he traveled in South America. Then he left Rio de Janeiro on the ship Bella for New York. A week or so afterward another vessel reported having passed at sea an overturned boat with the word "Bella" on the stern, as well as various other pieces of wreckage. The Bella never reached New York and it was commonly supposed that all on board had gone down with her.

      This belief Roger's mother never shared. After her husband's death in 1862 her conviction that her son had in some way been rescued became so strong that she advertised for information concerning him. A reply came from New South Wales saying that her son was in New Zealand, working as a butcher. More correspondence followed, with the result that the butcher finally arrived in England to claim the inheritance of Roger Tichborne — an inheritance which yielded an income of about five thousand dollars a year.

      That the newcomer really was Roger Tichborne the widow was determined to believe. The trustees of her husband's estate were less convinced by his story of a rescue at sea and life in Australia, and the matter dragged along for several years, Mrs. Tichborne doing all in her power to make up for the sudden lapses of memory concerning his past life to which her new-found son was subject. But so strange were these lapses that in 1874 the Australian was put on trial for perjury.

Strange Loss of Memory.

      For one hundred and sixty-eight days, the longest time recorded in the history of English justice, the trial dragged along. According to the defendant's counsel, his client had so injured his mind by a long course of dissipation that he could remember little of his past life. He had been drunk on the Bella and did not know just how the vessel had been wrecked. One boatload of persons had been picked up by the Osprey, a sailing-vessel bound for Australia, and landed at Melbourne. In Australia the possessor of an income of five thousand dollars a year, with wealthy relatives at home, had become first a servant, then a butcher, and had married a servant into the bargain. Also he had lived for some time in the bush. The only explanation vouchsafed was that Tichborne had decided to cut himself off entirely from his old associations in England.

      Against this story several things told heavily. No ship Osprey was entered on any of the records of Melbourne Harbor and no other survivors of the Bella had ever appeared. In its details the story was inconsistent, and moreover it did not agree with what was known of Roger's life before he left England.

      The jury found the defendant guilty of perjury and he was sent to prison. His real name, it was learned, was Arthur Orton. Of Roger Tichborne all he knew was what he learned from the advertisement and from an accomplice, an old servant of the family whom Orton met in Australia. The real Roger never appeared.

      The sea also was the chief factor in another famous disappearance, that of Theodosia Burr Alston. When Aaron Burr returned from exile in 1812 to begin, in the face of the hatred and scorn which met him on all sides, the task of paying off his creditors from the proceeds of his law practise in New York, his only child, Theodosia, was living in South Carolina, the wife of Governor Alston.

      The same year that her father came back from abroad Mrs. Alston's little son died. The shock was too much for her and it was decided that, to save her life, she must go North to her father, to whom she was devotedly attached.

      It was not so easy, however, to go North. Governor Alston was unable to leave the State in the midst of the war with England. She might have made the journey alone but for the unfortunate fact that the Alston coachman was a notorious drunkard who could not be trusted away from his master's eye.

Aaron Burr's Long Vigil.

      The only alternative, therefore, was to go by sea, and on December 30, 1812, Mrs. Alston went on board the schooner Patriot, which was expected to make the run from Charleston to New York in five or six days.

      Though formerly a privateer, on this cruise the Patriot carried her guns below as a peaceful trading-vessel should. Theodosia was accompanied by her maid and the physician whom her father's forethought had sent from New York to care for her on the voyage.

      On the sea-wall of Battery Park Burr waited long for the Patriot. To the end of his life the gray-haired man, shunned and execrated by his former friends, walked every day to the Battery, looking out to the Narrows for the sail that never came. Too much of a stoic to show his grief to the world, Burr was heard to say that now he felt "severed from the human race."

      Some time after it was evident that the Patriot was lost, the rumor spread that she had been captured by pirates, not sunk, and that Mrs. Alston was held as a slave.

      "No, no," cried Burr when he heard the story, "my daughter is dead. No prison on earth could keep Theodosia from me if she were alive."

      Until very recently there was nothing but the vague rumor to indicate that he was wrong. A few months ago, however, in a hut on the North Carolina coast, some pictures and other articles known to have been the property of Theodosia were unearthed. This hut, a tradition among the fishermen of the vicinity, assigns to the leader of one of the pirate crews which still infested the coast in the early years of the nineteenth century. What actually did happen on that voyage will never be known, for no member of the ill-fated Patriot's crew was ever heard of after the ship left Charleston.

The Lost Dauphin.

      But the most famous case of all is that of the "Lost Dauphin," Louis XVII of France. Books and articles innumerable have been written to prove that this unfortunate child of the Bourbons died in the prison of the Temple, in Paris, on June 8, 1795, or to prove that he did not die there at all. For the last hundred years "False Dauphins" have from time to time put forth their claims to be considered the rightful king of France, and though the controversy has long ceased to be of practical importance the old discussion is occasionally renewed.

      The orthodox belief is that after the death of his mother, Marie Antoinette, on the guillotine, in the "Reign of Terror," Louis, then a feeble child of ten, was brutally abused and neglected by his jailer, and that, gradually succumbing to the effects of ill-treatment, he died on June 8, 1795, and was hastily buried in some obscure grave. On the other hand, it is asserted that another child was substituted for the Dauphin, that sixty thousand dollars was given to the jailer, and that Louis was carried down the Seine in a boat. In their accounts of what happened to him then the various pretenders all differ.

      In support of the theory that Louis did escape there are certain well-authenticated facts. In one document, dated 1812, Louis XVIII speaks of himself as regent, not king, of France. No effort was ever made to find the grave of Louis XVII, though the supposed ashes of Louis XVI and of Marie Antoinette were exhumed and reinterred with great pomp in the abbey of St. Denis; and there are other indications that the Bourbons themselves doubted very much the death of the uncrowned king.

      There is also some medical evidence to show that in an interval of two or three days a very decided change in the condition of the Temple prisoner took place. Moreover Desault, the physician who had attended the boy, died suddenly eight days before his patient is alleged to have passed away, not without some suspicion of poison, and the physicians who took his place would not have been able to detect the substitution had there been one.

      In 1828 a Frenchman named Herbert came forward as the real Louis XVII. His story made little impression. After 1830 a Prussian named Naundorff made himself more conspicuous, and a few years ago the Rev. Eleazer Williams obtained quite a following in this country. Williams, the scoffers said, was really a half-breed Indian missionary who, after haunting Washington for a long time in the hope of obtaining money for the Indians, became very poor himself and possibly unbalanced mentally. He certainly had an interview with the Prince de Joinville, Louis Philippe's son, when the prince came to America in 1841, but there is nothing but Williams's word to support his assertion that in that interview the prince disclosed to him the secret of his birth. Whether Bourbon or half-breed, Williams did not flourish in this world, and in 1850 he died in poverty, his story very generally discredited.

      The discussion of the claims of such men as Herbert, Naundorff, and Williams has nothing to do, however, with the doubt that still hangs over the end of Louis XVII, King of France. Whether he died in the Temple, the victim of a shoemaker's brutality, or was spirited away to die years afterward in some unknown corner of the world, the grave of the descendant of the proudest family in Europe is as completely lost as that of the poorest gamin of Paris.

Captain Morgan's Strange Fate.

      In this country one of the most celebrated cases of disappearance was that of Captain William Morgan, a citizen of Batavia, in New York State. Unlike Louis, Morgan himself was of little consequence to the community, but his fate caused the creation of a political party and excited for years the whole of northern New York.

      Having been in turn mason, merchant, and brewer, Morgan drifted to Batavia from Rochester. In the spring of 1826 it was rumored in the vicinity that he was at work on a book which would reveal the secrets of Freemasonry and which was to be printed by a fellow townsman named Miller. Soon afterward a "Notice and Caution" appeared in a newspaper published in Canandaigua, a few miles from Batavia. This remarkable document concluded with these sentences:

      "Morgan is considered a swindler and a dangerous man. There are people in this village who would be happy to see this Captain Morgan."

      With the gathering of the storm and the very evident agitation of the Masons in the vicinity, Miller, the printer, began to grow alarmed, but Morgan persuaded him to keep on at the work. Several times Morgan was arrested for debt, and each time it happened that it was very difficult to find any one to give bail for him. On one occasion a mob collected and threatened to break into the printing- office. Upon learning that both Miller and Morgan were armed with shotguns, however, the crowd dispersed very quietly.

      Meanwhile, Miller's press was turning out page after page of the obnoxious book and the indignation grew greater and greater. Fire broke out near the printing-office. It was extinguished and the work went on. Then more vigorous measures were adopted.

      On the evening of September 10 Morgan was arrested on the complaint of an innkeeper and was charged with stealing a shirt and a cravat. He was driven to Canandaigua, where the charge of larceny, which would have put him in jail out of harm's way, was not pressed. Instead, Morgan was locked up for a debt of two dollars.

      The next night, a well-known man named Lawson came to the jail and insisted on paying the two dollars. The jailer was away and the jailer's wife was, with difficulty, persuaded that the proceeding was entirely regular. Morgan, walking out of the jail a free man, was seized on the steps, hustled into a carriage and driven off. His cries of "Murder" aroused some attention, but one or two respected citizens, who were standing by, satisfied the curious with offhand explanations and the carriage was not molested.

A Long, Weird Journey.

      In the woods near Rochester the persons inside the carriage got out. The driver, not even asking who was to pay him, turned back to Canandaigua and another carriage picked up the party. All day this carriage rolled along the "Ridge Road" to Niagara. Though the day was hot, the curtains were kept down and not a sound came from inside the vehicle. It seemed to be expected along its route, for relays of horses were in readiness.

      There was, however, some difficulty in getting reliable drivers, and it was soon noised around that Morgan had been taken to the deserted arsenal of Fort Niagara, the guardian of which was a Mason, and there locked up.

      So far there had been little mystery about the affair. Indeed, men boasted openly in the streets that Morgan had been put where he would disclose no secrets. The mystery began when the arsenal was broken open and no Morgan found there. Some one, it was evident, had been imprisoned there and had tried to batter his way out with an empty ammunition-box. Beyond that there was, at the time, no clue. Later, various things came to light.

      The prisoner, it was learned, had been taken across the river for a moonlight conference with two Canadian Masons. Then the earth seems to have swallowed him, for nothing more was ever heard or seen of Captain William Morgan. The Masons maintained that he had been sent West at his own desire; that he had been paid five hundred dollars, and that he was only too glad to be rid of his creditors in Batavia. The generally accepted belief was that he had been murdered and the body sunk in the lake.

      Though there was no legal evidence that Morgan had been murdered, there was little difficulty in discovering many of those who had been instrumental in his abduction. Eli Bruce, the sheriff of the county, served twenty-eight months in prison for his share in the proceedings, and his associates received similar sentences. For several years anti-Masonry was a live political issue in New York State.

      Echoes of another famous case of kidnaping are still heard. From time to time it is reported that "Charley Ross has been found at last." One after another, these stories have been proved false, and the fate of the boy is to-day as great a mystery as it was thirty-two years ago. Carried off from in front of his own house by two men when a boy of four, Charley seemed to vanish completely. The two kidnapers were shot a few months later while breaking into a house, but the one who knew where the boy had been concealed died without uttering a word. The other was barely able to gasp out:

      "It's no use lying now. Mosher and I stole Charley Ross from Germantown."

      He could not then tell where the boy was. All he moaned was: "Mosher knows," and Mosher was already dead.

      But sudden disappearances have not always been involuntary. One of the most extraordinary cases on record was the deliberate act of a man who apparently had no motive for his act, except a morbid curiosity to see what his wife would do. This story is the basis of Nathaniel Hawthorne's psychological study, "Wakefield."

Suddenly Called to Holland.

      In the year 1706 a prosperous London merchant named Howe told his wife that he had to go to the Tower on business. Later in the day she received a note from him, saying that he had been called to Holland for a week or two. For seventeen years she heard nothing of him. Then he came back to his old life again as quietly as if he had never left it.

      Instead of going to Holland he had merely gone around the corner and taken lodgings in the street next to his own home. There he had lived all these years, doing nothing but waiting for occasional glimpses of his wife as she passed through the street.

      After a while he discovered that the windows of the house across the street commanded an excellent view of the dining-room of his own home. He at once scraped up an acquaintance with the owner of the house and for the last seven or eight years of his voluntary exile dined there frequently, at the same time watching his wife at her solitary meal.

      What enjoyment he derived from this pastime he never explained, but it took him seventeen years to decide to return home. During this time he showed no interest in the deaths of his two children and did not even attend their funerals.

      More romantic, but at the same time more explicable, is the Oxford tradition of a student who later became Archbishop of York. This youth, a student of great promise, suddenly vanished from the halls of Oxford. Immediately afterward the fame of a certain pirate began to spread through the Mediterranean Sea and for several years continued to increase. His booty, rumor said, he took to a secret rock, where was also the home of a woman of great beauty.

      After a few years the woman was said to have died, and close on the heels of this rumor the famous pirate disappeared from the Mediterranean and the brilliant student reappeared at Oxford. Thereafter the student rose rapidly in the church, as quiet an ecclesiastic as one could wish to meet.

      In another celebrated case a learned scholar also figured. Some two hundred years ago, Everhard Feith, a distinguished Belgian professor, was visiting in Paris. While walking through the street one day, a man was seen to beckon to him from a house. Feith hesitated a minute, then entered the door and was never seen again. A search revealed nothing but an empty house with absolutely no clue to the professor's fate.

Vanished Into Space.

      Perhaps, however, the most celebrated case of the kind in this country was that of Oliver Morton Lerch, "The Man Who Disappeared." Lerch was literally removed from the face of the earth fifteen years ago, leaving nothing by which his disappearance might be even partially explained. For years a reward of one thousand dollars was offered for any tidings of the missing man, but no one ever appeared to claim the money.

      On Christmas Eve, 1889, a party of about twenty well-to-do farmers and their families filled the Lerch house near South Bend, Indiana. Among the guests were the Rev. Samuel Mallalieu, a Methodist minister, and a Chicago lawyer. About half past ten Oliver Lerch, a young man of twenty, was told by his father to fill a bucket at a well some seventy-five yards to the rear of the house. Though snow had been falling heavily during the evening, the sky was now cloudless and a full moon made the night almost as clear as day.

      Five minutes after Oliver had gone out with his bucket, the guests heard him shout for help. They rushed to the back of the house. There they heard again the cries for help, but young Lerch himself was nowhere to be seen. The cries seemed to come from the air above them.

      "Oliver, where are you?" shouted his father. The answer came from a spot directly over his head and apparently about one hundred feet in the air.

      "It's got me. Help me."

      At this, most of the guests bolted in terror. The father, the Rev. Mr. Mallalieu, and two others, stood their ground, however, and after a while the others crept back. For an hour they shouted to Oliver and for several minutes they heard answering shouts, each time fainter than before, but of Oliver himself they saw nothing. The cries were those of a person who was being carried farther and farther away — not of one who was growing weaker. Nothing more was ever known of Oliver Lerch.

      There was not then, nor is there now, any generally accepted explanation of young Lerch's disappearance. The boy's footprints in the clean snow ended about a third of the way to the well and the bucket was lying by the place where the footprints stopped. Since there were no other tracks, it seemed certain both that the boy had been seized from above and that he had been carried off through the air.

      Some persons thought that a hitherto unknown monster had swooped down upon him; others that he was the prey of a number of eagles; and one favorite theory was that he had been caught by the anchor of a balloon. There was, however, no evidence that any balloon ascension had been made anywhere in America on that day. On the other hand, the theory of the eagles was somewhat strengthened by the fact that a number of persons declared that Lerch had first cried: "They've got me!" not "It's got me!"

      But the only things certain were that Lerch was gone and that his cries had come from the air.

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