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He was sent to school, and Feuerbach bitterly complains that he was compelled to study the Latin grammar, 'and finally even Cæsar's Commentaries! Like other boys, Kaspar protested that he 'did not see the use of Latin, and indeed many of our modern authors too obviously share Kaspar's indifference to the dead languages.
From a letter of Feuerbach of September 20, 1828, we learn that Kaspar, 'without being an albino, can see as well in utter darkness as in daylight. Perhaps the man who taught Kaspar to write, in the dark, was an albino: Kaspar never saw his face. Kaspar's powers of vision abated, as he took to beef, but he remained hyperæsthetic, and could see better in a bad light than Daumer or Feuerbach.
It was a summer evening, Old Kaspar's work was done, And he before his cottage door Was sitting in the sun, And by him sported on the green His little grandchild Wilhelmine. She saw her brother Peterkin Roll something large and round, Which he beside the rivulet In playing there had found, He came to ask what he had found That was so large and smooth and round.
The early evidence shows that Kaspar could both walk and talk, and see normally, by artificial and natural light, all of which is absolutely inconsistent with Kaspar's later account of himself. The personal property of Kaspar was a horn rosary, and several Catholic tracts with prayers to the Guardian Angel, and so forth.
Feuerbach, who maintains that Kaspar's feet were covered with cruel blisters, from walking, also supposes that 'perhaps for the greater part of the way' he was carried in a carriage or waggon! Whence then the cruel blisters caused by walking? There is medical evidence that his legs were distorted by confinement, but the medical post-mortem evidence says that this was not the case.
In May 1831 Lord Stanhope, who, since the attack on Kaspar in 1829, had been curious about him, came to Nuremberg, and 'took up' the hero, with fantastic fondness. Though he recognised Kaspar's mythopoeic tendencies, he believed him to be the victim of some nefarious criminals, and offered a reward of 500 florins, anonymously, for information. It never was claimed.
Kaspar's legs were deformed in just such a way as would happen in the case of a person who had spent years sitting on the ground; he never walked properly to the end, and had great difficulty in getting upstairs.
New Gate no doubt just built? He said he came from Ratisbon, and was in Nuremberg for the first time, but clearly did not understand what Weichmann meant when he inquired as to the chances of war breaking out. In May 1834 Weichmann repeated his evidence as to Kaspar's power of talking and walking, and was corroborated by one Jacob Beck, not heard of in 1829.
Feuerbach thinks that the murderer had made a shot at Kaspar's throat with a razor, that Kaspar ducked cleverly, and got it on the brow, and that the assassin believed his crime to be consummated, and fled, after uttering words in which Kaspar recognised the voice of his tutor, the possible albino. No albino or other suspicious character was observed.
The letter carried by the boy said that the writer first took charge of him, as an infant, in 1812, and had never let him 'take a single step out of my house.... I have already taught him to read and write, and he writes my handwriting exactly as I do. In the same hand was a letter in Latin characters, purporting to come from Kaspar's mother, 'a poor girl, as the author of the German letter was 'a poor day-labourer. Humbug as I take Kaspar to have been, I am not sure that he wrote these pieces.
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