26 
Kaspar Hauser, 
rounded by his beloved toy horses, with which he was never tired 
of playing. He never ate or drank without offering all his horses 
a portion of his bread and water. It was evident that he made 
no distinction between living animals and their toy imitations, 
He was distressed when the mouth of a plaster horse was washed 
away by being dipped in water, and readily believed the jailers 
assurance that such a horse did not want to drink ; but he could 
not be made to believe that his wooden horses could not eat ; for 
he saw that crumbs of bread remained on their mouths. One 
horse had a bit in his wide-open jaws, and Kaspar, after having 
nade a bridle out of gilt thread, spent two whole days trying to 
put the bit into the closed mouth of another horse. Once he 
went to sleep on a rocking-horse and fell off, hurting his finger 
against the floor; whereupon he complained that the horse had 
bitten him, 
One day the horse which he was drawing over the floor caught 
its hind feet in a crack, which made it throw up its fore feet, to 
the great delight of Kaspar, who repeated the performance for 
the edification of every visitor. If a horse fell down he showed 
deep sorrow for having hurt it, and he was not to be comforted 
when on one occasion the jailer mended a broken horse by driv- 
ing a nail into the wood. He distinguished human beings from 
dumb animals merely by their shape, and men from women only 
by their different style of dress. He preferred his feminine 
acquaintance, because they wore brighter clothes, and he wished 
on that account to be a girl himself. He could not comprehend 
that grown people could ever have been children, or that children 
could become larger, and would not believe it until he was shown 
by repeated measurements upon the wall that he was growing 
himself. Concerning religious ideas he had not the faintest con- 
ception, as several pastors of Nuremberg were soon convinced, 
after trying in vain to solicit some expression upon the subject 
from himself and to make him understand what they wished him 
to know. 
As his mind became active, his interest in toys lessened, al- 
though he every morning arranged his horses and other playthings