On the 29th of June, 1721, John Kalb, the child of Hans Kalb and Margaret, his wife, peas ants, was born in the German town of Huttendorf. On the 19th of August, 1780, Major- General Baron de Kalb died prisoner of war in the American town of Camden, of wounds received three days before, in the defeat of the American General Gates by the English General Cornwallis. How and when did this peasant become a baron, and mingle his name with great historic names and great historic events? We find him at school at Kriegenbronn, a peasant boy still. We see him leave his native place at sixteen to earn his living as a butler. We lose sight of him for six years, and suddenly find ourselves face to face with him again to wards the end of 1743, with the distinctive de between the Jean and Kalb of his half Gallicized name, and the rank of lieutenant in the regiment of Lowenthal, a body of German infantry in the service of France. Had his regiment been composed of Frenchmen, it would have been easier to conceive how this young Ariovistus, six feet high, with his searching brown eyes, his ample forehead that suggested thought, his distinctly chiseled nose which like the great Condis suggested the beak of the eagle, the self-control and quiet consciousness of strength which mingled upon his lips somewhat as they did on Franklin’s, and the aristocratic double chin and haughty mien, could have passed himself as a noble in times when the herald’s office was consulted less than the air and bearing of the claimant of a title. But it was composed of Germans, familiar with the name and grades of German nobility and rigorous advocates of its privileges. By what arts or by what chance did our young adventurer succeed in persuading them that he was a noble man? How, too, did he, in six short years, succeed in transforming the obsequious butler into the proud baron? That he did thus pass from a peasant to a noble, and put on, as though they had been his birthright, the air and bearing of nobility, is a fact which Mr. Kapp has fully established, although he ha
