 CHAPTER 8 THE STRANGE CASE OF DANIEL DUNGLE'S HOME The case of Daniel Dungle's home is said in the Dictionary of National Biography to present a curious and unsolved problem. It really presents, I think, two problems equally unsolved, one scientific and the other social. How did Mr. Home, the son of a Scottish mother in the lower middle class at Highest, educated as far as he was educated at all in a village of Connecticut, attain his social position? I do not ask why he was taken up by members of noble English families. The caresses of the great may be lavished on athletes and actors and musicians, and Home's remarkable performances were quite enough to make him welcome in country houses. Moreover, he played the piano, the accordion, and other musical instruments. For his mysterious gift he might be invited to puzzle and amuse royal people, not in England, and continental emperors and kings. But he did much more than what Houdine or Alexis, a conjurer and a clairvoyant, could do. He successively married, with the permission and goodwill of the Tsar, two Russian ladies of noble birth, a feat inexplicable when we think of the rules of the continental noblesse. A duke or a prince or Marquis may marry the daughter of an American citizen who has made a fortune in lard, but the daughters of the Russian noblesse do not marry poor American citizens with the goodwill of the Tsar. By his marriages, Home far outwent such famous charlatans as Cagliostro, Mesmer, and the mysterious Saint Germain the Deathless. Cagliostro and Saint Germain both came on the world with an appearance of great wealth and display. The source of the opulence of Saint Germain is as obscure as was the source of the sudden enrichment of Beau Wilson, whom Law, the financier, killed in a duel. Cagliostro like Law may have acquired his diamonds by gambling or swindling, but neither these two men, nor Mesmer, though much in the society of Princess, could have hoped, openly and with the approval of Louis XV or Louis XVI, to wed a noble lady. Yet Home did so twice, though he had no wealth at all. Cagliostro was a low-born Neapolitan Ruffian, but he had a presence. In the memoirs of Madame Doberkirk, she tells us how much she disliked and distressed Cagliostro, always avoiding him and warning cardinal Rohan against him in vain. But she admits that the man dominated her or would have dominated her by something inexplicable in his eyes, his bearing, and his unaccountable knowledge, as when he publicly announced on a certain day the death of the great Empress Maria Teresa, of which the news did not arrive till five days later. Now, Home had none of this dominating personality. He has been described to me by a lady who knew him in his later years when he had seized to work drawing room miracles in society as a gentle, kindly, quiet person with no obvious fault, unless a harmless and childlike vanity be a fault. Thus, he struck an observer not of his intimate circle. He liked to give readings and recitations, and he played the piano with a good deal of feeling. He was a fair linguist. He had been a Catholic. He was of the middle order of intelligence. He had no mission except to prove that disembodied spirits exist, if that were a legitimate inference from the marvels which attended him. Mr. Robert Bell, in the Cornell Magazine, Volume 2, year 1860, described Home's miracles in an article called Stranger Than Fiction. His account of the man's personality is exactly like what I have already given. Home was a very mild specimen of familiar humanity. His health was bad. The expression of his face in repulse, he was only twenty-seven, is that of physical suffering. There is more kindness and gentleness than vigor in the character of his features. He is yet so young that the playfulness of boyhood has not passed away, and he never seems so thoroughly at ease with himself and others as when he is enjoying some light and temperate amusement. Thus there was nothing in home to dominate or even to excite personal curiosity. He and his more intimate friends, not Martianesses but middle-class people, corresponded in a style of rather distasteful effusiveness. He was a pleasant young man in a house, not a Dunwan. I have never heard a whisper about light loves, unless Mr. Hamilton Aidae, to be quoted later, reports such a whisper, not a word against his private character, except that he allowed a terribly vulgar rich woman to adopt him and give him a very large sum of money later withdrawn. We shall see that she probably had mixed motives both for giving and for withdrawing the gift. But it was asserted, though, on evidence far from sound, that the spirits had wrapped out a command to give home some thirty thousand pounds. Spirits ought not to do these things, and certainly it would have been wiser in home to refuse the widow's gold even if they did. Beyond this one affair and an alleged case of imposter at a seance, home's private character raised no scandals that have survived into our knowledge. It is a very strange thing, as we shall see, that the origin of home's miracles in broad daylight or artificial light could never be traced to fraud, or indeed to any known cause. While the one case in which imposter is alleged, on first-hand evidence, occurred under condition of light so bad as to make detection as difficult as belief in such circumstances ought to have been impossible. It is not easy to feel sure that we have certainly detected a fraud-initim light, but it is absurd to believe in a miracle when the conditions of light are such as to make detection difficult. Given this mild young musical man, the problems of how he achieved his social successes and how he managed to escape exposure if he did his miracles by conjuring are almost equally perplexing. The second puzzle is perhaps the less hard of the two, for home did not make money as a medium, though he took money's worth. And in private society, few seized and held the mystic hands that moved about, or when they seized they could not hold them. The hands melted away, so people said. A sketch of home's life must now be given. He was born in 1833 at Currie, a village near Edinburgh. In his later years, he sent to his second wife a photograph of the street of Cottages beside the Bern, in one of which he first saw the light. His father had a right to bear the arms of the earls of home, with a bridger being the natural son of Alexander, 10th Earl of Home. The medium's ancestor had fought, or according to other accounts, had shirked fighting at Flawden Field as is popularly known from the ballad of the suitors of Sulkirk. The maiden name of home's mother was MacNeil. He was adopted by an aunt who, about 1842, carried the wondrous child to America. He had, since he was four years old, given examples of second sight. It was in the family. Home's mother, who died in 1850, was second-sighted, as were her great-uncle, an Urquhart, and her uncle, a McKenzie. So far there was nothing unusual or alarming in home's case, at least to any intelligent highlander. Not till 1850, after his mother's death, did home begin to hear loud blows on the head of my bed, as if struck by a hammer. The Wesley family in the year 1716 to 1717 had been quite familiar with this phenomenon, and with other wrappings and movements of objects untouched. In fact, all these things are of worldwide diffusion, and I know no part of the world savage or civilized where such events do not happen, according to the evidence. In no instance, as far as I am informed, did anything extraordinary occur in connection with home, which cannot be paralleled in the accounts of Egyptian mediums in Iamblikus. In 1850, America was interested in the Rochester knockings and the case of the Fox Girls, a replica of the old Cock Lane case, which amused Dr. Johnson and Horace Walpole. The Fox Girls became professional mediums, and, long afterwards, confessed that they were imposters. They were so false that their confession is of no value as evidence, but certainly they were humbucks. The air was full of talk about them and other people liked them. When home, age 17, was so constantly attended by noises of wrappings that his aunt threw a chair at him, summoned three preachers. An independent, a Baptist, and it was Leon. Home was then it was Leon, and plunged into conflict with the devil. The furniture now began to move about, untouched by man, and home's aunt turned him out of the house. Home went to a friend in another little town. People crowded to witness the phenomena, and the press blazoned the matter abroad. Henceforth, home was a wonder worker. But once for a whole year, February 1856 to February 1857, the power entirely deserted him, and afterwards, for shorter periods. In 1852, he was examined by the celebrated American poet, Bryant, by a professor of Harvard and others who reported the usual physical phenomena, and emphatically declared that we know we were not imposed upon or deceived. Spirits spoke through the voice of the entranced home, or rapped out messages, usually gushing, and home floated in the air at the house of Mr. Warren Chenney, at South Manchester, Connecticut. This phenomenon is constantly reported in the Bible, in the lives of the saints by the Bollandists, in the experiences of the early Irvingites, in rich trials, in Iamblichus, and in savage and European folklore. Lord Elko, who was out with Prince Charles in the 45, writes in his unpublished memoirs that being at Rome about 1767, he went to hear the evidence in the process of canonizing a saint, recently dead, and heard witnesses swear that they had seen the saint, while alive, floating about in the air like home. Saint Therese was notorious for this accomplishment. Home's first feat of this kind occurred in a darkened room. A very dark room indeed, as the evidence shows, it had been darkened on purpose to try and experiment in seeing n-rays, which had been recently investigated by Reichenbach. Science has brought them recently back into notice. The evidence for the fact, in this case, was that people felt home's feet in midair. I have been lifted in the light of the day only once, and that was in America, also in the light of four gas lamps in a room in Slowen Street. After attracting a good deal of notice in New York, home on April 9, 1855, turned up at Cox's Hotel, German Street, where Mr. Cox gave him hospitality as a non-paying guest. Now occurred the affair of Sir David Brewster and Lord Brogum. Both were capable of hallucinations. Lord Brogum published an account of common death bed wraith, which he saw once while in a bath. The vision coincided with the death of the owner of the wraith. And Sir David's daughter tells us how that philosopher saw that of the Reverend Mr. Lyon in St. Leonard's College, St. Andrews, a wraith of whose owner was in perfect health. Sir David sent letters forming a journal to his family and, in June, no day given, 1855, described his visit to home. He says that he, Lord Brogum, Mr. Cox, in home, sat down at a moderately-sized table, the structure of which we were invited to examine. In a short time, the table shuttered, and a tremulous motion ran up our arms. The table actually rose from the round when no hand was upon it. A larger table was produced and exhibited similar movements. An accordion was held in Lord Brogum's hand and gave out a single note. A small handbell was then laid with its mouth on the carpet, and after lying for some time, it actually rang when nothing could have touched it. The bell was then placed upon the other side, still upon the carpet, and it came over to me and placed itself in my hand. It did the same to Lord Brogum. These were the principal experiments. We could give no explanation of them and could not conjecture how they could be produced by any kind of mechanism. We do not believe that it was the work of spirit. Sir David wrote in a private letter of June, 1855, just after the events. But the affair came to be talked about, and on September 29, 1855, Sir David wrote to the morning advertiser. He had seen, he said, several mechanical effects which I was unable to explain, but I saw enough to convince myself that they could all be produced by human feet and hands, though he also, in June, could not conjecture how they could be produced by any kind of mechanism. Later, October 9, Sir David again wrote to the newspaper. This time, he said that he might have discovered the fraud, had he been permitted to take a peep beneath the drapery of the table. But in June, he said that he was invited to examine the structure of the table. He denied that a large table was moved about in a most extraordinary way. In June, he had asserted that this occurred. He declared that the bell did not ring. In June, he averred that it rang when nothing could have touched it. In October, he suggested that machinery attached to the lower extremities of Mr. Holmes body could produce the effects. In June, we could not conjecture how they could not be produced by any kind of mechanism. Under David's death, his daughter and biographer, Mrs. Gordon, published in the year 1869, his letter of June, 1855. Holmes then scored rather freely, as the man of science had denied publicly in October, 1855, what he had privately written to his family in June, 1855, when the events were fresh in his memory. This was not the only case in which a scientist of European reputation did not increase his reputation for common veracity in his attempts to put down home. The adventures of home in the courts of Europe, his dissension of the errors of Vithlian Methodism for those of the Church of Rome, his handsome entertainment by diamond-giving emperors, his expulsion from Rome as a sorcerer and so forth, cannot be dealt with here for lack of space. We come to the great home-browning problem. In 1855, home met Mr. and Mrs. Browning at the house of a Mr. Reimer at Ealing, the first of only two meetings. On this occasion, says home, a wreath of clematis rose from the table and floated towards Mrs. Browning, behind whom her husband went and stood. The wreath settled on the lady's head, not on that of Mr. Browning, whom home thought was jealous of the favor. This is manifestly absurd. Soon after, all but Mr. Reimer were invited to leave the room. Two days later, Mr. Browning asked to be allowed to bring a friend for another seance, but the arrangement of the Reimers with whom home was staying made this impossible. Later, home with Mrs. Reimer called on the Brownings in town, and Mr. Browning declined to notice home. There was a scene, and Mrs. Browning, who was later a three-quarters believer in spirits, was distressed. In 1864, after Mrs. Browning's death, Mr. Browning published Mr. Sludge, the medium, which had the air of a personal attack on home as a detected and confessing American imposter, such as Tom's account. It was published in 1872 and was open to contradiction. I'm not aware that Mr. Browning took any public notice of it. In July, 1889, the late Mr. F. W. H. Myers and Professor W. F. Barrett published in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, page 102, the following statement. We have found no allegations of fraud in home on which we should be justified in laying much stress. Mr. Robert Browning has told to one of us, Mr. Myers, the circumstances which mainly led to that opinion of home, which was expressed in Mr. Sludge, the medium. It appears that a lady, since dead, repeated to Mr. Browning a statement made to her by a lady and gentleman, since dead, has to their finding home in the act of experimenting with phosphorus on the production of spirit lights, which, so far as Mr. Browning remembers, were to be rubbed around the walls of the room near the ceiling, so as to appear when the room was darkened. This piece of evidence, powerfully impressed Mr. Browning, but it comes to us at third hand without written record and at a distance of nearly 40 years. Clearly, the story is not evidence against home, but several years ago, an eminent writer whom I need not name, published in a newspaper, another version. Mr. Browning had told him, he said, that sitting with home and Mrs. Browning, apparently alone, these three in a darkened room, he saw a wide object rise above the table. This home represented as the phantasm of a child of Mr. and Mrs. Browning, which died in infancy. Mr. Browning sees the phantasm, which was home's naked foot, but it must be remembered that one, Mr. and Mrs. Browning had no child, which died in infancy, and two, Mrs. Browning's belief survived the shock. On December 5, 1902, in the Times literary supplement, a letter by Mr. R. Barrett Browning appeared. He says, Mr. Hume, who subsequently changed his name to home, Helm is pronounced human Scotland, was detected in a vulgar fraud, for I have heard my father repeatedly describe how he caught hold of his foot under the table. In the other story, the foot was above the table. In the new version, no infant phantasma occurs. Moreover, to catch a man's foot under the table in itself proves nothing. What was the foot doing, and why did Mr. Browning not tell this, but quite a different story to Mr. Myers, we get no for order. On November 28, 1902, Mr. Maryfield, in the Times literary supplement, published a letter on August 30, 1855, from Mrs. Browning to Mr. Godrian, as to the seance with the Browning's at Ealing. Mrs. Browning enclosed the letter from Mr. Browning, giving his impressions. Mine, I must frankly say, were entirely different, wrote Mrs. Browning, and Hume says, Mrs. Browning was much moved, and she not only then, but ever since expressed her entire belief and pleasure in what occurred. In her letter, Mrs. Browning adds, for my own part and in my own conscience, I find no reason for considering the medium in question responsible for anything seen or heard on that occasion. But I consider that the seeking for intercourse with any particular spirit would be apt to end either in disappointment or delusion, and she uses the phrase, the supposed spirit. This lady who wrote thus at the time cannot conceivably have been looking for the ghost of a child that never was born and been deceived by Hume's white foot, which Mr. Browning then caught hold of, an incident which Mrs. Browning could not have forgotten by August 30, 1855, if it occurred in July of that year. Yet Mr. Blank has published this statement that Mr. Browning told him that story of Hume's foot, dead child and all, and Mr. Blank is a man of undoubted honor and of the acutest intelligence. Mr. Browning, August 30, 1855, assured Mr. Gajian that he held the whole display of hands, spirit utterances, and to be a cheat and imposter. He acquitted the rimers at whose house the seance was held of collusion and spoke very highly of their moral character. But he gave no reason for his disbelief and said nothing about catching hold of Hume's foot, either under or above the table. He simply states his opinion. The whole affair was melancholy stuff. How can we account for the story of Mr. Browning and Hume's foot? Can poets possess an imagination too exuberant or a memory not wholly accurate? But Mr. Merrifield had written on August 18, 1855 a record of an Ealing seance of July 1855 about 14 people sat round a table in a room of which two windows opened on the lawn. The nature of the light is not stated. There was heaving up of the table, tapping, playing an accordion under the table and so on. No details are given, but there are no visible hands. Later by such light as exists when the moon has set on a July night, Hume gave another seance. The outlines of the windows we could well see end the form of any large object intervening before them, though not with accuracy of outline. In these circumstances, in a light sufficient, he thinks Mr. Merrifield detected an object resembling a child's hand with a long white sleeve attached to it, and also attached to Hume's shoulder and arm and moving as Hume moved. A lady who later became Mrs. Merrifield corroborated. This is the one known alleged case of detection of fraud on Hume's part, given on firsthand evidence and written only a few weeks after the events. One other case I was told by the observer very many years after the event, and in this case, fraud was not necessarily implied. It is only fair to remark that Mr. F.W.H. Myers thought these phantasmal arms instructive in more than one respect, as applying a missing link between near phantasms and ectoplastic phenomena. Now, this is the extraordinary feature in the puzzle. There are many attested accounts of hand seen in Hume's presence in a good light with no attachment, and no fraud is known ever to have been detected in such instances. The strange fact is that if we have one record of a detection of Hume in a pure ill fraud in a faint light, we have none of a detection in his most notable phenomena in a good light. To take one example in the 19th century for April 1896, Mr. Hamilton Aide published the following statement of which he had made the record in his diary more than 20 years ago. Mr. Aide also told me the story in conversation. He was prejudiced against Hume, whom he met at Nice in the house of a Russian lady of distinction. His very physical manifestations, I was told, had caused his expulsion from more than one private house. Of these aberrations, one has not heard elsewhere. Mr. Aide was asked to meet M. Alfon's car, one of the hardest-headed, the wittiest and most skeptical men in France. A well-merited description at a séance with Hume. Mr. Aide's prejudice, M. Carr's hard-headed skepticism, proved them witnesses not biased in favor of hocus-pocus. The two arrived first at the villa and were shown into a very large, uncarpeted and brilliantly lighted salon. The furniture was very heavy. The tables were mostly of marble and none of them had any upon them. There were about twenty candles in sconces, all lit, and a moderator lamp in the center of the ponderous round rosewood table at which we were to sit. Mr. Aide examined the room carefully and observed that wires could not possibly be attached to the heavy furniture arranged along the walls and on the polished floor wires could not escape notice. The number present, including Hume, was nine when all had arrived. All hands were on the table, but M. Alphonse Carr insisted on being allowed to break the circle, go under the table, or make any other sort of search whenever he pleased. This, Hume, made no objection to. Wraps went round under the table, fluttering hither and thither in a way difficult to account for by the dislocation of the medium's toe or knee. The common explanation I may remark that this kind of wrapping is now so rare that I think Mr. Frederick Meyers with all his experience never heard it. Mr. Aide was observant enough to notice that a lady had casually dropped her bracelet though she vowed that it was snatched from her by a spirit. It was certainly removed from her lap and danced about under the table. Then suddenly a heavy armchair placed against the wall at the further end of the solato ran violently out into the middle of the room towards us. Other chairs rushed about with still greater velocity. The heavy table then tilted up in the moderator lamp with some pencils slid to the lower edge of the table but did not fall off. Mr. Aide looked under the table. Homes' legs were inactive. Homes said that he thought the table would ascend and Alfonso Carr dived under it and walked about on all fours examining everybody's feet the others for standing up. The table rose three or four feet at highest and remained in air from two to three minutes. It rose so high that all could see Carr and see also that no one's legs moved. M Carr was not a little annoyed but as Sando could not have lifted the table evenly even if allowed to put his hands beneath it and as Homes at one side had his hands above it clearly Homes did not lift it. All alike beheld this phenomenon and Mr. Aide asks was I hypnotized? Were all hypnotized? People have tried to hypnotize Mr. Aide never would success and certainly no form of hypnotism known to science was here concerned. No process of that sort had been gone through and except when Homes said he thought the table would ascend there had been no verbal suggestion. Nobody was told what to look out for. In hypnotic experiment it is found that A if told to see anything not present will succeed B will fail C will see something and so on. Though these subjects have been duly hypnotized which Mr. Aide had not. That an hypnotized company or a company wholly unaware that any hypnotic process had been performed on them should all be subjected by any one to the same hallucination by an unuttered command is a thing unknown to science and most men of science would deny that even one single person could be hallucinated by a special suggestion not indicated by outward word gesture or otherwise. We read of such feats in tales of glamour like that of the goblin page in the lay of the last menstrual but psychological science I repeat they are absolutely unknown. The explanation is not what is technically styled of Veracosa Mr. Aide's story is absolutely unexplained and it is one of scores attested in letters to home from people of undoubted sense in good position. Mr. Myers examined unauthenticated the letters by post marks, handwriting and other tests. In one case the theory of hallucination induced by home so that people saw what did not occur was asserted by Dr. Carpenter FRS Dr. Carpenter who was a wonderfully superior person wrote the most diverse accounts of a seance will be given by a believer and a skeptic one will declare that a table rose in the air while another who had been watching its feet is confident that it never left the ground. Mr. Aide's statement proves that this explanation does not fit his case. Dr. Carpenter went on to say what was not true. A whole party of believers will affirm that they saw Mr. Holm float in at one window and out at another. Whilst a single un-skeptic declares that Mr. Holm was sitting in his chair all the time this was false. Dr. Carpenter referred to the published statement of Lord Adair, John Raven and Lord Lindsay, the Earl of Crawford, that they saw Holm float into a window of the room where they were sitting out of the next room where Holm was and float back again at Ashley Place, SW December 16, 1868. No un-skeptic was present and denied the facts. The other person present Captain Wynn wrote to Holm in a letter listed with excisions of some contemptuous phrases by Madame Holm and read in the original MS by Mr. Myers. He said, I wrote to the medium to say I was present as a witness. I don't think that anyone who knows me would for one moment say that I was a victim to hallucination or any humbug of that kind. Dr. Carpenter writing in the quarterly review Volume 131 Pages 336 to 337 had criticized Lord Lindsay's account of what occurred on December 16, 1868. He took exception to a point in Lord Lindsay's grammar. He asked why Lord Lindsay did not cite the two other observers and he said, one doubt that the observations were made by moonlight. So Lord Lindsay had said. But the curious may consult the almanac. Even in a fog, however, people in a room can see a man come in by the window and go out again, head first with the body rigid at a great height above the ground. Mr. Podmore has suggested that Holm, the rustic head and shoulders out of the window and that the three excited friends fancied the rest but they first saw him in the air outside of the window of the room. Nothing is explained in this case by Dr. Carpenter's exclamation. Dr. Carpenter year 1871 discredited the experiments made on home by Sir William Cooks and attested by Sir William Huggins because the latter was only an amateur in a branch of research which tasks the keenest powers of observation not of experiment. While in the chemical experiments of Sir William Cooks, the ability he displayed was purely technical. Neither gentlemen could dream that there are moral sources of error. Alas Dr. Carpenter when he boldly published in 1876 the thing that was not proved that a scientist may be misled by moral sources of error. In 1890 in proceedings of the SPR Sir William Cooks published full contemporary accounts noted by himself of his experiments on home in 1871. With elaborate mechanical tests as the alteration of weight and recorded home's feats and handling red-hot coals and communicating the power of doing so to others into a fine Cambric handkerchief on which a piece of red-hot charcoal lay some time. Beyond a hole of half an inch in diameter to which home drew attention, the Cambric was unharmed. Sir William tested it it had undergone no chemical preparation. Into the details of the mechanical test has to alterations of weights I cannot go. Mr. Angelo Lewis, Professor Hoffman an expert in conjuring says that accepting Sir William's veracity and that he was not hallucinated the phenomena seemed to me distinctly to be outside of the range of trick and therefore to be good evidence so far as we can trust personal evidence at all of home's power of producing motion without contact in inanimate bodies. Sir William himself writes in the year 1890 I have discovered no flaw in the experiment or in the reasoning I based upon them. The notes of the performances were written while they were actually in course of proceeding. Thus the table rose completely off the ground several times, while the gentleman present took a candle and kneeling down deliberately examined the position of Mr. Holmes knees and feet and saw the three feet of the table quite off the ground. Every observer in turn satisfied himself of the facts. They could not all be hallucinated. I have not entered on the spiritual part of the puzzle. The communications from spirits of matters not consciously known to persons present, but found to be correct. That is too larger subject, nor have I entered into the case of Mr. Lyon's gift to home. The evidence only proved as the judge held that the gift was prompted at least to some extent by what home declared to be spiritual wrappings. But the only actual witness to the fact Mrs. Lyon herself was the reverse of a trustworthy witness being a foolish, capricious underbred woman. Hume's mystery as far as the rest of the drawing room miracles are concerned is solved by no theory or combination of theories neither by the hypothesis of conjuring nor of collective hallucination nor of a blend of both. The cases of Sir David Brewster and of Dr. Carpenter prove how far some scientists will go rather than appear in an attitude of agnosticism and explanation. Note since this paper was written I have been obliged by several interesting communications from a person very intimate with Hume. Nothing in these threw fresh light on the mystery of his career still less tended to confirm any theory of dishonesty on his part. His legal advisor a man of honour saw no harm in his accepting Mrs. Lyon's proffered gift though he tried in vain to prevent her from increasing her original present. End of Chapter 8 The Strange Case of Daniel Dunglos Hume Recording by Femme Mendoza Please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Vox Dockery Ypsilanti, Michigan Historical Mysteries by Andrew Lang The Case of Captain Green Play on Captain Green's woody said the caddy on leaf links and his employer struck his ball in the direction of the captain's givet on the sands. Mr. Duncan Forbes of Culliton's side and taking off his hat out in the direction of the unhappy mariner's monument. One can imagine this little scene repeating itself many a time long after Captain Thomas Green his mate John Matter or Mather and another of his crew were taken to the sands at Leith on the second Wednesday in April 1705 being April 11 and there hanged within the flood mark upon a givet till they were dead. Mr. Forbes of Culliton later president of the court of session and far more than the butcher Cumberland the victor over the rising of 1745 believed in the innocence of Captain Green, war mourning for him, attended the funeral at the risk of his own life and when the portious riot was discussed in Parliament, rose in his place and attested his conviction that the captain was wrongfully done to death. Green, like his namesake in the Popish plot was condemned for a crime of which he was probably innocent. He died for a crime which was not proved to have been committed, though it really may have been committed by persons with whom Green had no connection, while Green may have been guilty of other misdeeds as bad as that for which he was hanged. Like the other Green, executed for the murder of Sir Edmund Barry Godfrey during the Popish plot, the captain was the victim of a fit of madness in a nation, that nation being the Scottish. The cause of their fury was not religion the fever of the Covenant had passed away but commerce. Twer long to tell and said to trace the origin of the Caledonian frenzy in 1695 the Scottish Parliament had passed with the royal assent an act granting a patent to a Scottish company dealing with Africa the Indies and incidentally with the globe at large. The act committed the occupant of the Scottish throne, William of Orange, to backing the company if attacked by alien power but it was unlucky that England was then an alien power and that the Scots act infringed the patent of the much older English East India Company. Englishmen dared not take shares finally in the venture of the Scots and when the English Board of Trade found out in 1697 the real purpose of the Scottish Company, namely to set up a factory in Darien and anticipate the advantages dreamed of by France in the case of Monsieur de Lessep's Panama Canal. A strange thing happened. The celebrated philosopher, Mr. John Locke and the other members of a committee of the English Board of Trade advised the English government to plagiarize the Scottish project and seized the section of the Isthmus of Panama on which the Scots meant to settle. This was not done but the Dutch usurper far from backing the Scots Company bade his colonies hold no sort of intercourse with them. The Scots were starved out of their settlement. The few who remained fled to New York and Jamaica and their perishing of hunger were refused supplies by the English General Governors. A second Scottish colony succumbed to a Spanish fleet and army and the company with a nominal capital of 400,000 pounds and with 220,000 pounds paid up was bankrupt. Macaulay calculates the loss at about the same as a loss of 40 millions would have been to the Scotland of his own day, let us say 22 millions. We remember the excitement in France over the Panama failure. Scotland in 1700 was even more furious and that led to the hanging of Captain Green and his men. There were riots. The rioters were imprisoned in the heart of Midlothian, the Tolbooth. The crowd released them, some of the crowd were feebly sentenced to the pillory, the public pelted them with white roses, and had the chivalier to St. George not been a child of 12 he would have had a fair chance of recovering his throne. The trouble was tied it over. William III died in 1702. Queen Anne came to the crown. But the company was not dead. Its charter was still legal and with borrowed money it sent out vessels to trade with the Indies. The company had a vessel, the Anondale, which was seized in the Thames at the instance of the East India Company and condemned for a breach of that company's privileges. This capture awakened the sleeping fury among my fiery countrymen 1704. An English ship, connected with either the English East India Company or the rival million company, put into Leith Road to repair. Here was a chance. For the charter of the Scots Company authorized them to make reprisals and to seek and take reparation of damage done by sea and land. On the strength of this clause, which was never meant to apply to Englishmen in Scottish waters but to foreigners of all kinds on the Spanish Main, the Scottish admiralty took no steps. But the company had a Celtic secretary, Mr. Roderick Mackenzie, and the English Parliament in 1695 had summoned Mr. Mackenzie before them and asked him many questions of an impertinent and disagreeable nature. This outrageous proceeding he resented for he was no more in English than he was a Japanese subject. The situation of the Worcester in Scottish waters gave Roderick his chance. His chief difficulty as he informed his directors was to get together a sufficient number of such genteel, pretty fellows as would of their own free accord on a sudden advertisement be willing to accompany me on this adventure, namely the capture of the Worcester, and whose dress and behavior would not render them suspected of any uncommon design in going aboard. A scheme more sudden and daring than the seizure by a few gentlemen of a well-armed English vessel had not been executed since the bold Buclew forced Carlisle Castle and carried away Kinman Willey. The day was Saturday and Mr. Mackenzie sauntered to the cross in the high street and invited genteel and pretty fellows to dine with him in the house. They were given an inkling of what was going forward, and some dropped off like the less-resolute guests in Mr. Stevenson's Adventure of the Handsome Cavs. When they reached Leith, Roderick found himself at the head of eleven persons, of whom most be as good gentlemen, and, I must own, much prettier fellows than I pretend to be. They were of the same sort as Roy Middleton, Halliburton, and Dunbar, who fourteen years earlier, being prisoners on the Bass Rock, seized the castle, and through three long years held it for King James against the English Navy. The eleven chose Mr. Mackenzie as chief, and having swords, pistols, and some with bayonets, too, set out. Mackenzie, his servant, and three friends took a boat at Leith, with provision of wine, brandy, sugar, and lime juice. Four more came as a separate party from New Haven. The rest first visited an Englishman a war on the Firth, and then, in a convivial manner, boarded the Worcester. The punch bowls were produced, liquor was given to the sailors, while the officers of the Worcester drank with the visitors in the cabin. Mackenzie was supposed to be a lord. All was festivity, a most complete scene of comedy, acted to the life, when, as a Scottish song was being sung, each officer of the Worcester found a pistol at his ear. The carpenter and some of the crew rushed at the loaded blunderbuses that hung in the cabin, but there were shining swords between them and the blunderbuses. At night, on August 12th, Mackenzie's followers were masters of the English ship, and the hatches, gun room, chests, and cabinets were sealed with the official seal of the Scottish-African and East India Company. In a day or two, the vessel lay without rudder or sails in Bruntisland harbour, as secure as a thief in a mill. Mackenzie landed eight of the ship's guns and placed them in an old fort commanding the harbour entry, manned them with gunners, and all this, while an Englishman was on board. For a peaceful secretary of a commercial company, with a scratch eleven picked up in the street on a Saturday afternoon, to capture a vessel with a crew of twenty-four well accustomed to desperate deeds was a sufficient camisado or onfall. For three or four days and nights, Mr. Mackenzie had scarcely an hour's sleep. By the end of August he had commenced an action in the High Court of Admiralty for condemning the Worcester and her cargo to compensate for the severe seizure of their ship, the Anondale. When Mackenzie sent in his report on September 4, he added that, from very odd expressions dropped now and then from some of the ship's crew, he suspected that Captain Green, of the Worcester, was guilty of some very unwarrantable practices. The Scottish Privy Council were now formally apprised of the affair, which they cautiously handed over to the Admiralty. The Scottish Company had for about three years bewailed the absence of a ship of their own, the speedy return, which had never returned at all. Her skipper was a Captain Drummond, who had been very active in the Darian expedition. Her surgeon was Mr. Andrew Wilkie, brother of James Wilkie, Taylor and Burgess of Edinburgh. The pair were most probably descendants of the Wilkie, Taylor and the Cannongate, who was mixed up in the odd business of Mr. Robert Oliphant, in the garrie conspiracy of 1600. Friends of Captain Drummond, Surgeon Wilkie, and others who had returned, began to wonder whether the crew of the Worcester and their wanderings had ever come across news of the missing vessel. One George Haynes of the Worcester, hearing of a Captain Gordon, who was the terror of French privateers, said, Our sloop was more terrible upon the coast of Malibar than ever Captain Gordon will be to the French. Mackenzie, asking Haynes if he had ever heard of the speedy return, the missing ship, Haynes replied, You need not trouble your head to haste. He thought that Captain Drummond had turned to pirate. Haynes now fell in love with a girl at Bruntasland, aged 19, named Anne Seaton, and told her a number of things which she promised to repeat to Mackenzie, but disappointed him, though she had blabbed to others. It came to be reported that Captain Green had pirated the speedy return and murdered Captain Drummond and his crew. The Privy Council in January 1705 took the matter of the seal or forged copy of the seal of the Scottish African and East India Company, was found on board the Worcester, and her Captain and crew were judicially interrogated after the manner of the French Juge d'instruction. On March 5, 1705, the Scottish Court of Admiralty began the trial of Green and his men. Charles May, Surgeon of the Worcester, and two Negroes, Antonio for Denando, Cook's mate, and Antonio Frenchy Scho, Captain's man, were ready to commence against their comrades. They were accused of attacking between February and May 1703 off the coast of Malibar, a vessel bearing a red flag, and having English or Scots aboard. They pursued her in their sloop, seized and killed the crew, and stole the goods. Everyone in Scotland, except Resolute Whigs, believed the vessel attacked to have been Captain Drummond's speedy return. But there was nothing definite to prove the fact, there was no corpus delicti. In fact, the case was parallel to that of the Captain Mystery, in which three people were hanged for killing old Mr. Harrison, who later turned up in perfect health. In Greens, as in the Captain Case, some of the accused confessed their guilt, and yet evidence later obtained tends to prove that Captain Drummond and his ship and crew were all quite safe at the date of the alleged piracy by Captain Green. Nonetheless, it does appear that Captain Green had been pirating somebody, and perhaps he was none the warra of the English Commission to act against pirates, it was argued that if he had been fighting at all, it was against pirates that he had been making war. Now, Haynes remarked that Captain Drummond, as he heard, had turned pirate, looks very like a hedge to be used in case the Worcester was proved to have attacked the speedy return. There was a great deal of preliminary sparring between the advocates, as to the propriety of the indictment. The jury of fifteen contained five local skippers, most of the others were traders. One of them, William Blackwood, was of a family that had been very active in the Darien Fair. Captain Green had no better chance with these men than James Stewart of the Glens in face of a jury of Campbells. The first witness, Ferdinando, the Black Sea Cook, deponed that he saw Green's flue take a ship under English colors, and that Green, his mate Matter, and others killed the crew of the captured vessel with hatchets. Ferdinando's coat was part of the spoil, and was said to be of Scottish cloth. Charles May, surgeon of the Worcester, being on shore, heard firing at sea, and later dressed a wound, a gunshot, he believed, on the arm of the Black Cook, dressed wounds also of two sailors of the Worcester, McKay and Cumming, Scots, obviously, by their names. He found the deck of the Worcester when he came on board, lumbered with goods and chests. He remarked on this, and Matter the mate cursed him, and baited him to mine his playster box. He added that the Worcester before his eyes while he stood on shore was towing another vessel, which he heard was sold to a native dealer, Kosh Komodo, who told the witness that the Worcester had been fighting. The Worcester sprang a leak and sailed for five weeks to a place where she was repaired, as if she were anxious to avoid inquiries. Antonio Francesco, Captain Green's Black Servant, swore that being chained and nailed to her forecastle, he heard the Worcester fire six shots. Two days later a quantity of goods was brought on board, captured it would seem by the terrible Worcester, and Ferdinando then told this witness about the killing of the captured crew and showed his own wounded arm. Francesco himself lay in chains for two months and, of course, had a grudge against Captain Green. It was proved that the Worcester had a cipher wherein to communicate with her owners, who used great secrecy, that her cargo consisted of arms and was of such slight value as not to justify her voyage, unless her real business was piracy. The ship was of two hundred tons, twenty guns, thirty-six men, and the value of the cargo was but one thousand pounds. Really, things do not look very well for the enterprise of Captain Green. There was also found a suspicious letter to one of the crew, Reynolds, from his sister-in-law, advising him to confess and referring to a letter of his own in which he said that some of the crew had basically confessed. The lady's letter and a copy of Reynolds's admitted by him to be correct were before the court. Again, James Wilkie Taylor had tried Bruntesland to pump Haynes about Captain Drummond. Haynes swore profane, but later said that he heard Drummond had turned pirate, and that off the coast of Malibar they had manned their sloop, less Drummond, whom they believed to be on that coast, should attack them. Other witnesses corroborated Wilkie, and had heard Haynes say that it was a wonder the ground did not open and swallow them for the wickedness that had been committed during the last voyage on board of that old, I omit a nautical term of endearment best. When telling Haynes that the mate's uncle had been burned in oil for trying to burn Dutch ships at Amsterdam, the said George Haynes did tell the deponent that if what Captain Matter, the mate, had done during his last voyage were known, he deserved as much as his uncle had met with. Anne Seton, the girl of Haynes's heart, admitted that Haynes had told her that he knew more of Captain Drummond than he would express at that time, and she had heard his expressions of remorse. He had blabbed to many witnesses of a precious something hidden aboard the Worcester. To Anne he said that he had now thrown it overboard. We shall see later what this object was. Anne was a reluctant witness. Glen, a goldsmith, had seen a seal of the Scots East India Company in the hands of Matter, the inference being that it was taken from the speedy return. Sir David Dalrymple for the prosecution made the most he could of the evidence. The black cook's coat, taken from the captured vessel, in my judgment appears to be Scots rug. He also thought at a point in favor of the cook's veracity that he was very ill, and forced to lie down in court. In fact, the cook died suddenly on the day when Captain Green was condemned, and the Scots had a high opinion of dying confessions. The white cook, who joined the Worcester after the sea fight, said that the black cook told him the whole story at that time. Why did the Worcester sail for thirty-five days to repair her leak, which she might have done at Goa, or Surat, instead of sailing some seven hundred leagues for the purpose? The jury found that there was one clear witness to robbery, piracy, and murder and accumulative corroboration. The judges ordered fourteen hangings, to begin with those of Green, Matter, and three others on April 4. On March 16, at Edinburgh, Thomas Linnsteed made an affidavit that the Worcester left him on shore on business about January 1703, that fishing crews reported the fight of this loop against a vessel unknown. They left before the fight ended that the Dutch and Portuguese told him how the Worcester's men had sold a prize and thought but little of it, because it is what is ordinary on that coast and that the Worcester's people told him to ask them no questions. On March 27 George Haynes made a full confession of the murder of a captured crew, he being accessory there too at Sacrifice Rock, between Telecheri and Calicut, and that he himself, after being seized by Mackenzie, threw his journal of the exciting events overboard. Now in his previous blabbings before the trial, as we have seen, Haynes had spoken several times about something on board the Worcester, which the Scots would be very glad to lay hands on, thereby indicating this journal of his, and he told Anne Seton, as she deponed at the trial, that he had thrown the precious something overboard. In his confession of March 27 he explained what the mysterious something was. He also declared March 28 that the victims of the piracy spoke the Scots' language. A sailor named Broccoli also made full confession. These men were reprieved and doubtless expected to be, but Haynes all the while remorseful, I think, told the truth. The Worcester had been guilty of piracy. But had she pirated the Scottish ship, the speedy return, Captain Drummond? As to that point on April 5 in England, two of the crew of the Worcester, who must somehow have escaped from Mackenzie's raid, made affidavit that the Worcester fought no ship during her whole voyage. This would be more satisfactory if we knew it. On March 21 at Portsmouth, two other English mariners made affidavit that they had been of the crew of the speedy return, that she was captured by pirates, while Captain Drummond and Surgeon Wilkie were on shore, at Maritain in Madagascar, and that these two witnesses went on board a mocha ship called the Defiance, escaped from her at the Mauritius, and returned to England in the Raper Galley. Of the fate of Drummond and Wilkie, left ashore in Madagascar, they naturally knew nothing. If they spoke truth, Captain Green certainly did not seize the speedy return, whatever dark and bloody deeds he may have done off the coast of Malibar. In England, as Secretary Johnstone, son of the Cate of Covenanterre Warriston, wrote to Bailey of Jerviswood, the Whigs made party capital out of the proceedings against Green. They said it was a Jacobite plot. I conceive that few Scottish Whigs to be sure marched under Roderick Mackenzie. In Scotland, the Privy Council refused Queen Anne's name should be suspended till her pleasure was known, but they did grant a week's respite. On April 10, a mob, partly from the country, gathered in Edinburgh. The Privy Council between the mob and the Queen let matters take their course. On April 11, the mob raged around the meeting place of the Privy Council, rooms under the Parliament House, and chevied the Chancellor into a narrow close once he was hardly rescued. However, learning that Green was to swing after all the execution of an Englishman, the whole affair hastened to the Union of 1707, for it was a clear case of union or war between the two nations. As for Drummond, many years later on the occasion of the Portious Riot, Forbes of Culloden declared in the House of Commons that a few months after Green was hanged, letters came from Captain Drummond of the speedy return, and from the very ship whose captured the unfortunate person suffered, informing their friends that they were all safe. But the crew say, off Madagascar, and burned. What was the date of the letters from the speedy return, to which, long afterwards, Forbes and he alone referred? What was the date of the capture of the speedy return at Maritain in Madagascar? Without the dates, we are no wiser. Now comes an incidental and subsidiary mystery. In 1729 was published Madagascar, or Robert Drury's journal during fifteen years' captivity on that island, written and suggested into order, and now published at the request of his friends. Drury says, as we shall see, that he, a lad of fifteen, was prisoner in Madagascar from about 1703 to 1718, and that there he met Captain Drummond, late of the speedy return. If so, Green certainly did not kill Captain Drummond. But Drury's narrative seems to be about as authentic and historical as the so-called souvenirs of Madame Decrecchi. In the edition of 1890 of Drury's book, edited by Captain Passfield Oliver, R.A., author of Madagascar, the Captain throws a lurid light on Drury in his volume. Captain Passfield Oliver first candidly produces what he thinks the best evidence for the genuineness of Drury's story, namely a letter of the reverend Mr. Hearst on board HMS Lennox off Madagascar, 1759. This gentleman praises Drury's book as the best and most authentic, for Drury says that he was wrecked in the degrave, East Indiemen, and he agrees, as far as it goes, with the journal kept by Mr. John Benbo, second mate of the degrave. That journal of Benbos was burned in London in 1714, but several of his friends remembered that it tallied with Drury's narrative. But, as Drury's narrative was certainly edited, probably by Defoe, that master of fiction may easily have known and used Benbo's journal. Otherwise, if Benbo's journal contained the same references to Captain Drummond in Madagascar as Drury gives, then the question is settled. Drummond died in Madagascar after a stormy existence of some eleven years on that island. As to Drury, Captain Passfield Oliver thinks that his editor probably Defoe, or an imitator of Defoe, faked the book, partly out of Deflaque Orts, Histoire de Madagascar, 1661, and a French authority adds another old French source, Dapper's description de la frigue. Drury was himself a pirate, his editor thinks. Defoe picked his brains, or an imitator of Defoe did so, or whoever was the editor, would know the story that Drummond really lost the speedy return in Madagascar, and could introduce the Scottish adventurer into Drury's romance. We can never be absolutely certain that Captain Drummond lost his ship, but lived on as a kind of conditieri to a native prince in Madagascar. Between us, and complete satisfactory proof, a great gulf has been made by fire and water, foes of old as the Greek poet says, which conspired to destroy the journal kept by Haynes and the journal kept by Benbo. The former would have told us what piratical adventures Captain Green achieved in the Worcester. The latter, if it spoke of Captain Drummond in Madagascar, would have proved that the Captain and the speedy return were not among the Worcester's victims. If we could be sure that Benbo's journal corroborated Drury's romance, we could not be sure that the editor of the romance did not borrow the facts from the Journal of Benbo, and we do not know that this journal made mention of Captain Drummond, for the only valid testimony as to the Captain's appearance in Madagascar and the affidavit of Israel Fipini and Peter Freeland at Portsmouth, March 31, 1705, and these mariners may have purged themselves to save the lives of English seamen condemned by the Scots. Yet, as a patriotic Scot, I have reason for believing in the English affidavit at Portsmouth. The reason is simple but sufficient. Captain Drummond, if attacked by Captain Green, was the man to defeat that officer, make prize of his ship, and hang at the yard arm the crew so easily mastered by Mr. Roderick Mackenzie and eleven pretty fellows. Hence I conclude that the Worster really had been pirating off the coast of Malibar, but that the ship taken by Captain Green in these waters was not the speedy return, but another, unknown. If so, there was no great miscarriage of justice, for the indictment against Captain Green did not accuse him of seizing the speedy return, but of piracy, robbery, and murder, though the affair of the speedy return was brought in to give local color. This fact, and the national excitement in Scotland, probably turned the scale with the jury, who otherwise would have returned a verdict of not proven. That verdict, in fact, would have been fitted to the merits of the case, but there was meritent at suremer than when Captain Green was hanged. That Green was deeply guilty, I have inferred from the evidence. To Mr. Stephen Ponder I owe corroboration. He cites a passage from Hamilton's new account of the East Indies, Chapter 25, which is crucial. The fortunate Captain Green, who was afterwards hanged in Scotland, came on board my ship at sunset, very much overtaken in drink and several of his men in the light condition, at Calicut, February 1703. He wanted to sell Hamilton some arms and ammunition, and told me that they were what was left of a large quantity that he had brought from England, but had been at Madagascar and had disposed of the rest to good advantage among the pirates. I told him that in prudence he ought to keep these as secrets, lest he might be brought back. He made but little account of my advice, and so departed. About ten in the night his chief mate, Mr. Mather, came on board of my ship and seemed to be very melancholy. He burst out in tears and told me he was afraid that he was undone, that they had acted such things in their voyage that would certainly bring them to shame and punishment if they should come to light, and he was assured that such a company of drunkards as their crew was composed of could keep no secret. I told him that I had heard at prudently, nor honestly, in relation to some Moore's ship they had visited and plundered, and in sinking a sloop with ten or twelve Europeans in her off Coilone. Next day I went ashore and met Captain Green and his supercargo, Mr. Callant, who had sailed a voyage from Surat to Sienli with me. Before dinner time they were both drunk and Callant told me that he did not doubt of making the greatest voyage that ever was made from England on so small a stock as five hundred pounds. In the evening their surgeon accosted me and asked if I wanted a surgeon. He said he wanted to stay in India for his life was uneasy on board of his ship, that though the captain was civil enough, yet Mr. Mather had treated him with blows for asking a pertinent question of some wounded men who were hurt in the engagement with the sloop. I heard too much to be contented with their conduct, and so I shunned their conversation for the little time I stayed at Calicut. Whether Captain Green and Mr. Matthew came partially in their trial and sentence I know not. I have heard of as great innocence condemned to death as they were. The evidence of Hamilton settles the question of the guilt of Green and his crew as regards some unfortunate vessel or sloop. Had the speedy return? A sloop with her? End of The Case of Captain Green Chapter 10 of Historical Mysteries This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Kay Hand Historical Mysteries by Andrew Lang Chapter 10 Queen Oglethorpe In collaboration with Ms. Alice Shield Her Oaks She was kind, acute, resolute, and of good counsel. She gave the Prince much good advice that was too weak to follow, and loved him with a often fidelity which he returned within ingratitude quite royal. So, write Colonel Henry Esmond, describing that journey of his to Bar-Le-Duke in Lorraine, whence he brought R Fosterback Monsieur Baptiste back Monsieur Baptiste, all to win fair Beatrix Esmond. We know how Monsieur Baptiste stole his lady love from the glum colonel, and ran after the maids, and drank too much wine, and came to the king's arms at Kensington the day after the fair. He was always after the fair, and found Argyle's regiment in occupation, and heard King George proclaimed. Where in the world did Thackery pick up the materials of that brilliant picture of James the Eighth? Gay, witty, reckless, ready to fling away three crowns for a fine pair of eyes, or a neat pair of ankles? His Majesty's enemies brought against him precisely the opposite kind of charges. There is a broad sheet of 1716, Hugh and Cry after the Pretender, which is either by swift or by one of the gentlemen whom, like Captain Bobadil, he had taught to write almost or altogether as well as himself. As to Gayety and James, you tell him it is a fine day, and he weeps, and says he was unfortunate from his mother's womb. As to ladies, a weakness for the sex remarked in many popular monarchs, as Adderbury said to Lady Castlewood. Our pamphletier tells the opposite tale. Two Highland charmers being introduced to comfort him after the comfort of a man, James displayed an incredible inhumanity to beauty and clean linen, merely asking them whether they thought the Duke of Argyle would stand another battle. It is hard on a man to be stamped by history as recklessly gay and amorous, also as a perfect Mrs. Gummidge for a tearful sentiment, and culpably indifferent to the smiles of beauty. James is greatly misunderstood. The romance of his youth, sword and cloak and disguise, pistol, dagger and poison, prepared for him. Story of true love, blighted by a humorous cast of destiny, voyages, perils, shipwrecks, dances at ends, all is forgotten or is unknown. Meanwhile, who was her Oglethorpean Majesty, and why does the pamphletier of 1716 talk of James Stewart, alias Oglethorpe? By a strange combination of his bad luck, James is called Miss Oglethorpe's ungrateful lover by Thackeray, and Miss Oglethorpe's brother by the pamphletier, and by Wigslander in general. Thackeray, in fact, took Miss Oglethorpe from the letter which Bollingbroke wrote to Wyndham after Sean Germain found him out, as St. James's had done for a traitor. Bollingbroke merely mentions Fanny Orglethorpe as a busy intriguer. There is no evidence that she ever was at Barley Duke in her life, none that she ever was Queen Oglethorpe. We propose to tell, for the first time, the real story of this lady and her sisters. The story centers round the meath home for incurables. This excellent institution occupies Westbrook Place, an old house at Godelming, close to the railway, which passes so close as to cut off one corner of the park, and of the malodorous tan yard between the remnant of grounds and the riverway that once washed them. On an October day, the Surrey Hills standing roundabout in shadowy distances, the silence of two centuries is scarcely broken by the rustle of leaves dropping on their own deep carpet, and the very spirit of a lost cause dwells here, slowly dying. The house stands backed by a steep wooded hill, beyond which cornfields clothe the walled and meet the sky. The mansion is a gray, two-storied parallelogram flanked by square towers of only slighter elevation. They are projecting bays surmounted by open work cornices of leafy tracery in white or stone. The tale used to run, one has heard it vaguely in conversation, that the old house at Godelming is haunted by the ghost of Prince Charlie, and one naturally asks, what is he doing there? What he was doing there will appear later. In 1688, the year of the Regifugium, Westbrook Place was sold to Theophilus Oglethorpe, who had helped to drive the Whigs, Fre Bothel Briggs, and later to Route Monmouth at Sedgemore. This gentleman married Eleanor Wall of an Irish family, a Catholic, a cunning devil, says Swift. The pair had five sons and four daughters, about whom county histories and dictionaries of biography blunder in a helpless fashion. We are concerned with Anne Henrietta, born probably about 1680-83, Eleanor 1684, James, June 1st 1688, who died in infancy, and Francis Charlotte, Bowlingbrooks, Fanny Oglethorpe. The youngest brother, James Edward, born 1696, became the famous philanthropist General Oglethorpe, Governor of Georgia, patron of the Westleys, and, in extreme old age, the bow of Hannah Moore, and the gentleman who remembered shooting snipe on the site of Conduit Street. After the revolution, Sir Theophilus was engaged with Sir John Fenwick, was with him when he cocked his beaver in the face of the Princess of Orange, had to fly to France after the failure at La Hogue, and in 1693 was allowed to settle peacefully at Westbrook Place. Anne and Eleanor were left in France where they were brought up as Catholics at Saint Germain and befriended by the exile James and Mary of Modena. Now in 1699, Theophilus, one of the Oglethorpe boys, was sent out to his father's old friend, Mr. Pitt, Governor of Fort St. George in India, the man of the Pitt Diamond. His outfit had to be prepared in a hurry, and a young gentlewoman, Frances Shaftow, was engaged to help with the sewing of his several dozens of linen shirts, the flourishing of neck cloths and drawing of cotton stripes, as young gentlewomen of limited means were used to do before they discovered hospitals and journalism. This girl, who developed a political romance of her own, was of good Northumberland family, related to Sir John Fenwick and the Delavaux. Her father, a merchant in Newcastle, had educated her in a civil and virtuous manner, and she had lived there about 18 years, behaving herself discreetly, modestly, and honestly, as nine Northumberian Justices of the Peace were ready to testify under their hand. The strange story she later told of her experiences at Westbrook and afterwards cannot therefore be wholly dismissed as a tale trumped up for political purposes, though its most thrilling incident is so foolish a lie as to discredit the whole. On the Saturday before Christmas, 1699, so ran her later revelations made in 1707, she took the coach from Godelming, obedient to instructions by letter from Sir Theophilus. A little way down the strand he joined her in the coach, accompanied by two young ladies, friends she was told of Lady Oglethorpe, and for some time she knew no more of who they were and whence they came. They were very secret, appeared in no company, but made themselves useful in the pleasant, homely ways of English country life of that time. Helped with the sewing, made their own bed, swept their chamber, dressed the two little girls, Mary and Fanny, and waited on each other. Presently it turned out that they were Anne and Eleanor Oglethorpe, who had been eleven years in France at the court of James II, where they were known as Anne and Eleanor Barkley. They had taken advantage of the peace to come secretly over a long sea, and had waited at the house of their mother's brother-in-law, Mr. Cray, the city wine merchant, until Parliament was up and their father could take them home for Christmas. A member of Parliament must not be compromised by the presence of Catholic daughters from Saint Germain, whom it was treason even to harbor. Fanny Shaftot was admitted into the family, she says, on quite familiar terms, but always behaved very meek and humble, ready to help any of the servants to make beds or to take care of the little boy, the general, when his nurse was busy helping in the garden. Anne and Eleanor were Mary friendly girls and chatted only two freely with Fanny Shaftot over the sewing. She certainly heard a great deal of treason talked. She heard how Sir Theriophilus and his wife went back and forward disguised between England and Saint Germain, how Lady Orwell Thorpe had taken charge of the Queen's diamonds when she fled from Whitehall and safely returned them three years later, traveling as an old doctor woman in a riding-hood, selling powders and plasters in a little basket. There was unseemly jubilation over the death of Queen Anne's son, the little Duke of Glauchester, in July 1700, though Fanny admits they were sorry at first, and somewhat partisan comparisons were drawn between him, a poor, soft child who had no wit. He was really a very promising spirited boy, and the little Prince of Wales, who was very witty. To this careless chatter, Fanny Shaftot added exaggerations and backstairs gossip, and an astounding statement which lived as the feeblest lie can live. Anne Oglethorpe, she said, informed her that the real Prince of Wales, born June 10, 1688, had died at Windsor of convulsions when five or six weeks old, that lady Oglethorpe hurried up to town with her little son James, born a few days before the Prince, and that the Oglethorpe baby died or was lost on the road. The truth was a secret between her mother and the Queen. All they knew was that their little brother never turned up again, and added, confusing the story by too much detail, as all accounts of the royal fraud are confused, that the children had been sick together, that the Prince had then died and her brother had been destituted for him. In November 1700, Francis Shaftot, according to her later revelations, left Westbrook. Her mother had written from Newcastle to say her sister was dying. Anne and Eleanor were very sympathetic. They were really nice girls. Lady Oglethorpe was very kind, and gave her four guineas for her eleven months' services. Anne, she seems to have been satisfied with it as handsome remuneration. She asserts inconsistently that she had much adieu to get away, but she never went to Newcastle. Three months later, being still in London, she was sent forward to a house in the Strand, where she met Anne Oglethorpe. Anne gave her a letter from her mother, which had been kept back because Anne had expected to come up sooner to town, otherwise she would have sent it. Anne had a cold and a swelled face. She and Eleanor were going to France, and she persuaded Fanny to go with them. To make a long tale short, they shut her up in a convent lest she should blab the great secret. James Stewart is really James Oglethorpe. In September 1701, James II died, and Lady Oglethorpe carried to the Princess Anne the effecting letter of farewell he wrote to her, commending his family to her care. Anne and Eleanor went to England in November 1702, and from that date until Easter 1706, Fanny Schaftow says she heard no more about them. In April 1702, Sir Theophilus died, and was buried in St. James's Piccadilly, where the memorial erected by his widow may be seen. Theophilus the heir probably remained a while in the Far East with Pitt, but there were Oglethorpes nearer home to dabble in the Scots plot of that year, 1704. In June several Scottish officers, Sir George Maxwell, Captain Livingston, and others, mounting to fifteen or sixteen, with three ladies, one of whom was Anne Oglethorpe, embarked at the Hague for Scotland. Sir George had tried in vain to procure a passport from Queen Anne's envoy, so though it was in wartime, they sailed without one. Harley, informed by Captain Lacken, late of Goway's foot in Piedmont, told Lord Treasurer Godolphin who had the party arrested on landing. The Queen, who plotted as much as anybody on behalf of her brother, was indulgent to fellow conspirators, and though it was proved their purpose had been to raise commotions in Scotland, they were soon set at liberty, and the informer said back to Holland with empty pockets. Anne Oglethorpe, nevertheless, having crossed without a pass, lay at the mercy of the government, but as with Joseph in Egypt, her misfortune turned into her great opportunity. The late Mr. H. Manners, in an article in the Dictionary of National Biography, supposes she had been King James's mistress before she left St. Germain. Now, see how Thackeray has misled historians. He makes Fanny Oglethorpe, James Mistress, Queen of Oglethorpe, at Bar-la-Duke in the 1714, and resting on this evidence, Mr. Manners represents Anne Oglethorpe as James's mistress at St. Germain in 1704. Anne left St. Germain before James was 16, and her character is blasted by the easy plan of mistaking her for her younger daughter, who was no more Queen Oglethorpe than she was. Poor Anne did not escape Calumny, perhaps deserved it. Boyer says that Gadolphin and Harley quarreled for her smiles, which beamed on Harley, Lord Oxford, Swift's dragon, and an irreconcilable enmity arose. In 1713, Shutz describes Anne Oglethorpe as Oxford's mistress, but she had troubles of her own before that date. She arrived in England, a Jacobite conspirator in 1704. Her wit and beauty endeared her to Harley, and she probably had a foot in both camp, Queen Anne's and King James's. But in 1706, strange rumors came from the North. Mrs. Shaftow had, after five years' silence, received letters from her daughter Fanny, the Semstress, by a secret hand, and was filling Newcastle with lamentations of her trepanning, imprisonment, and compulsory conversion, with the object of making Fanny a nun. A young English priest, agent for supplying the Catholic Squires of Northumberland with chaplains, was sent to France by her Catholic cousin, Mrs. de Laval to find out the truth. The consequence of his inquiries was that Anne Oglethorpe was arrested in England, and charged before the Queen and Council with trepanning and trying to force Fanny Shaftow to become a nun. Anne flung herself at the Queen's feet and implored mercy. She escaped being sent to Newgate, was imprisoned in a messenger's house to await further proceedings, and ordered to produce Fanny Shaftow as a witness. Eleanor Oglethorpe was in France, and rushed to the convent where Fanny Shaftow was held captive, told her how Anne was imprisoned on her account, and treated her to sign a statement that she had come to France to become a Catholic of her own free will. But Fanny refused. Her long detailed story was printed and published for the prosecution in 1707, at the moment when the Chevaliers' chances in Scotland were most promising. Had he landed only with his valet, says Kerr of Kersland, Scotland would have been his. Cameronians and Cavaliers alike would have risen. But the French Admiral would not put him on shore. As for Anne, she was discharged, having great allies, but Fanny Shaftow's story did its work. James Stewart, for wig purposes, was James Oglethorpe, Anne's brother. Fanny's narrative was re-published in 1745 to injure Prince Charlie. Restored to society and Harley, Anne queened it royally. If we believe Old Tom Hearn, whose MSS are in the Baudelienne, Anne practically negotiated the Treaty of Utrecht. She found a French priest, whose sister was in the household of Madame de Montenon. She wrote mysterious letters to him. She showed them to Louis XIV, and the priest was presently lurking in Miss Oglethorpe's town house. Harley visited his ageria. She introduced the Abbey, Gauthier, the Abbey himself, and Messagère were appointed by France to treat. Harley insisted on the surrender of Dunkirk. Louis offered Anne Oglethorpe 2 million Levera if she would save Dunkirk for France. Her Oglethorpean Majesty refused the gold, but did Louis turn on condition that he would restore King James? For all this magnanimity we have only Tom Hearn's word. Swift, for example, was not likely to reveal these romantic circumstances about the lady and the dragon. Swift does not mention Anne in his letters, but being so deep in the greatest intrigues of the day and in the smallest, she was a valuable source of information to Thomas Cart, the non-juring historian and her lifelong correspondent when he was gathering materials for his life of the first Duke of Ormond and his history of England. Nairn, James' secretary, desires Abram Menzias to inquire if Mrs. Oglethorpe had credit with Hointain and how far. Shutz, the Hanoverian envoy, writes to Boffmar November 21, 1713. Miss Oglethorpe, the Lord Treasurer's mistress, said that the pretender was to travel, and she said it on the very day the news came from Holland that the Bishop of London had declared to the pletipotentiaries who they are, that the Queen entreated their masters not to receive the pretender in their dominions. She knew all the particulars of Harley's opposition to the Duke of Ormond's schemes for improving the army, and what the Exchequer could and could not supply to back them. She knew all about Lady Masham's quarrel with her cousin Lord Oxford in 1713 over the 100,000 L in 10% which Lady Masham had expected to make out of the Quebec Expedition and Asiento contract had not his lordship so dis-obliged her. Anne acted as intermediary hunting up her friend the Duke of Ormond with whom her mother had great influence in fetching him to meet Lady Masham at Kensington. Who told him out hill the Queen was and how uneasy at nothing being done for her brother the Chevalier. If Ormond would but secure Lady Masham 30,000 L of the 100,000 L she would join with him and he should have the modeling of the army as he pleased. Ormond also failed to oblige Lady Masham but Bowlingbroke whom she hated snatched his opportunity in the quarrel and got her the money. In return for which service Lady Masham had Harley turned out of the office and Bowlingbroke set in his place. And then Queen Anne died. Miss Oglethorpe also knew that Sir Thomas Hanmer and Bishop Atterbury were the two persons who sent the messenger, mentioned only as Sir C.P. in the cart papers made to France in 1715. Women seemed to have managed the whole political machine in those days as the lengthy and mysterious letters of Mrs. White, Jean Murray and others in the cart MSS testify. We are not much concerned with the brothers of the Oglethorpe girls but the oldest theophilus turned Jacobite. That he had transferred his allegiance and active service to King James is provided by his letters from Paris to James and to Goulterio in 1720 and 1721. According to the second report on the Stuart papers at Windsor he was created a baron by James the third in 1717. In 1718 he was certainly outlawed for his younger brother James Edward the famous general Oglethorpe succeeded to the Westbrook property in that year. In July 1714 Fanny Oglethorpe, now about 19 turns up as an active politician. The Chevalier at Barre and his adherents in Paris, Scotland and London were breathlessly waiting for the death of Queen Anne which was expected to restore him to the throne of his ancestors. Fanny had been brought up a Protestant by her mother in England under whose auspices she had served her apprenticeship to plotting. Then she came to France but Fanny cannot have been Thackerie's Queen Oglethorpe at Barre Le Duc. In the first place she was not there until Lorraine was reigning monarch. With the fall of Oxford in 1714 ended Anne's chief opportunity of serving her king. The historian therefore turns to her sister Eleanor who had been with her in the Fanny Shaftow affair but remained in France. Pennyless as she was Eleanor's beauty won the heart of the Marquis de Mezière a great noble, a man over 50 ugly, brave, Miss Schaben. There's nonetheless was a love match admiringly proclaimed. The frog-faced Marquis, the vainest of men, was one of the most courageous. Their daughters became the princesses of Montébon and de Ligue whose brilliant marriages caused much envy. Of their sons we shall hear later. Young Fanny Oglethorpe, a girl of 20 in 1715 resided with her sister Eleanor Madame de Mezière and now bowling-broke, flying from the tower and become the minister of James, grumbles at the presence of Fanny and of Olive Trent among the conspirators for a restoration. Olive, the region's mistress was the great wheel of the machine in which Fanny had her corner at Saint-Germain. Your female teasers, James calls them in a letter to bowling-broke not a word is said of a love affair. How the 15 ended we all know, ill-managed by Mar, perhaps betrayed by bowling-broke, the rising collapsed, returning to France James dismissed bowling-broke and retired to Avignon, then to Urbino and last to Rome. In 1719 he describes Mrs. Oglethorpe's letters as politically valueless and full of self-justifications and old stories. He answers them only through his secretary but in 1722 he consoled poor Anne by making her a countess of Ireland. Anne's bolt was shot, she had had her day but the day of her fair sisters was dawning. Mr. John Law, of Loristan, Soydistan had made England too hot to hold him. His great genius for financial combinations was at this time employed by him in Gleek, Trick Track, Quadril, Wist, Lou, Ombra, and other pastimes of mingled luck and skill. In consequence of a quarrel about a lady, Mr. Law fought and slew Bo Wilson, that mysterious person who from being a poverty-stricken younger son, hanging loose on town became in a day, no man knows how, the richest and most splendid of blades. The Bo's secret died with him but Law fled to France with 100,000 crowns in his valise. Here the swagger, courage, and undeniable genius of Mr. Law gained the flavor of the regent Del Lien's. The bank and the Mississippi scheme were floated. The roux, Kimmy Campoy, was crowded. France swam in a dream of gold and the friends of Mr. Law coming in on the ground floor or buying stock before issue at the lowest prices sold out at the top of the market. Paris was full of Jacobites from Ireland and Scotland, Seaforth to Le Bardin, Campbell of Glen de Roule, George Kelly, one of the seven men of Moidart, Nick Wogan, Gaest and Bravest of Irishmen, all engaged in a pleasing plan for invading England with a handful of Irish soldiers in Spanish service. The Earl Marachal and Keith's brother, the Field Marshal, came into Paris, broken men, fleeing from Glenchill. They took no Mississippi shares, but George Kelly, Fanny Oglethorpe and Olive Trant, all liaised with Law and Orleans, plunged and emerged with burdens of gold. Fanny for her share had 800,000 livra and carried it as her dowry to the Marquis de Marchet, whom she married in 1719. And so ceased conspiring. The Oglethorpe girls for penniless exiles had played their cards well. Fanny and Eleanor had one noble husband. Poor Anne went back to Godelming, where, in the very darkest days of the Jacobite Party, when James was a heartbroken widower, and the star of Prince Charles' natal day, shown only on the Siege of Gaeta, she plotted with Thomas Cart the historian. The race of 1715 was passing, the race of 1745 was coming on, and touching it is to read in the brown old letters the same loyal names, Floyd, Wogan's, Goreng's, Trant's, Dillon's, Stafford's, Sheridan's, the Scots, of course, and the French descendents of the Oglethorpe girls. Eleanor's infants, the des messier family, had been growing up in beauty and honor, as was to be expected of the children of the valiant Marquis and the charming Eleanor. Their eldest daughter, Eleanor Eugenie, married Charles de Rohan, Prince de Montaibon, younger brother of the Duke de Montbasson, whose wife was the daughter of the Duke de Bouillon and Princess Caroline Sobiesca, and so first cousins to the sons of James III. That branch of the Oglethorpes thus became connected with the royal family, which would go far towards rousing their hereditary Jacobitism when the 45 cast its shadow before. In May 1740, Madame de Messier took it into her head to run over to England and applied to Newcastle for a pass through Lady Mary Herbert of Powis, a very suspect channel. The minister made such particular inquiries as to the names of the servants she intended to bring that she changed her mind and did not go. One wonders what person purposed traveling in her suite whose identity dared not stand too close scrutiny. There was a brave and eager Prince of Wales over the water, nearly twenty, who had some years ago fleshed his maiden sword with honour and who was in secret correspondence on his own account with his father's English supporters. Could he have had some such plan even then of putting fate to the touch? He is reported in Cox's wallpole to have been in Spain in disguise years before. In 1742 Eleanor had the sorrow of losing a daughter in a tragic way. She had recently become a canoness of Povacé, a very noble foundation indeed in Lorraine where the sisters were little black ribbons on their heads which they called husbands. She was twenty-five, very pretty and most irreligiously devoted to shooting and hunting. Though these chapters of noble canonesses are not by any means strict after the use of ordinary convents, there were serious expostulations made when the novice insisted upon constantly carrying a gun and shooting. She fell one day when out with her gun as usual. It went off and killed her on the spot. Whatever Eleanor aimed at in 1740 by a journey to England was bulked by Newcastle's caution. In 1743 the indefatigable lady and a Scottish lord submitted a scheme to Louis the 15th but it was thwarted by day noiles. Then Prince Charles wrote secretly out of Rome landed like Napoleon at Frasieu and at the expedition of Dunkirk met the Earl Marichal and young Glen Gary. Chevalier des Mezières, too, Eleanor's son went to Dunkirk with sacks to embark for England. There was a great storm and the ships went aground. Several officers and soldiers jumped into the sea and some were drowned. The Chevalier des Mezières came riding along the shore to hear that a dear friend was drowning. The sea was going back but very heavy and de Mezières rode straight into the raging waters to seek his friend. The waves went over his head and carried away his hat but he persevered until he had seized a man. He dragged him ashore to find it was a common soldier. He hastened back and saved several soldiers and two or three officers. His friend, after all, had never been in danger. The sacks expedition never sailed so Eugene des Mezières went to beat Henneverian's elsewhere and was wounded at Fontenoy. Consequently he could not follow the Prince to Scotland. His mother Eleanor plunged into intrigue for the forward party Prince Charlie's party distrusted by James at Rome. She is a mad woman, said James. She and Cart the historian were working up an English rising to join the Prince's Scottish adventure but were baffled by James's cautious helpless advisors. Then came the forty-five. Eleanor was not subdued by Culloden. The undefeated old lady was a guest at the great dinner with a splendid new service of plate which the Prince gave to the Princess de Talmon and his friends in 1748. He was braving all Europe in his hopeless way and refusing to leave France in accordance with the treaty of Axelot Chapelle. When he was imprisoned at Vincennes Eleanor was threatened. Catholic as she was she frankly declared that Prince Charles had better declare himself a Protestant and marry a German Protestant princess. He therefore proposed to one a day or two before he disappeared from Avion in February 1749 and he later went over to London and embraced the Anglican faith. It was too late but Eleanor Orgothorp was not beaten. In October 1752 the great affair was being incubated again. Alexander Murray of the Ella Bank family exasperated by his imprisonment for a riot at the Westminster election had taken service with Prince Charles. He had arranged that a body of young Jacobite officers in foreign service with 400 Highlanders under young Glen Gary should overpower the guards, break into St. James's palace and seize King George while the Westminster mob Murray's lambs should create an uproar. Next day Glen Gary would post north the Highlanders would muster at the House of Touch and Charles would appear among his beloved subjects. The very medal to commemorate the event was struck with its motto The Prince was on the coast in readiness nay, if we are not mistaken the Prince was in Westbrook House at Godelming. This we conjecture because in that very budding time of the Ella Bank plot Newcastle suddenly discovered that the unweary Eleanor Oglethorpe Marquis de Mezière was in England had arrived secretly without any passport. He tracked her down at Westbrook House that lay all desolate and deserted. The windows closed the right of way through the grounds illegally shut up. General Oglethorpe after 1746 had abandoned his home for he had been court-martialed on a charge of not attacking Clooney and Lord George Murray when the Highlanders stood at bay at Clifton and defeated Cumberland's advanced guard. The general was acquitted but retiring to his wife's house at Carham he deserted Westbrook Place. The empty house, retired in its woodlands on the Portsmouth Road convenient for the coast was the very place for Prince Charles to lurk in while Murray and Glengarry cleared the way to the throne. And so in fact we find Eleanor Oglethorpe secretly ensconced at Westbrook Place while the plot ripened and local tradition still shows the vault in which the pretender could take refuge if the house was searched. All this again coincides with the vague legend of the tall brown-haired ghost who haunts Westbrook Place last home of a last hope. The young Glengarry as we know carried all the tale of the plot to the English Prime Minister while he made a merit of his share in it with James at Rome. Eleanor too was run to earth at Westbrook Place. She held her own currently. As to having no passport she reminded Newcastle that she had asked for a passport 12 years ago in 1740. She was now visiting England merely to see her sister Anne who could not outlast the winter but who did so nonetheless. Nor could Anne have been so very ill for on arriving at Dover in October Eleanor did not hasten to Anne's sickbed. Far from that she first spent an agreeable week with whom? With my lady Westmoreland at Mereworth in Kent. Now Lord Westmoreland was the head of the English Jacobites in at Mereworth according to authentic family tradition Prince Charles held its last council on English ground. The whole plot seems delightfully transparent and it must be remembered that in October Newcastle knew nothing of it. He only received Glengarry's information early in November. The letter of Madame de Mesier with her account of her innocent proceedings is written in French exactly like that of the Dowager Countess of Castlewood She expressed her special pleasure in the hope of making Newcastle's personal acquaintance. She went to Bath She made Lady Albemarle profoundly uncomfortable about her lord's famous mistress in Paris and no doubt she plunged on her return into the plots with Prussia for a restoration. In the Privy Council in November 1753 her arrest was decided on. Newcastle drops down on a paper of notes to seize Madame de Mesier with her papers no expense to be spared to find the pretender's son. Sir John Goodrich to be sent after him Lord Anson to have frigates on the Scotch and Irish coasts. By 1759 Eleanor was perhaps weary of conspiring. Her daughter the Princessa de Ligny was the fair patroness of that expedition which Hawke crushed in Kiberon Bay while Charles received the news at Dunkirk. All was ended. For 72 years the Oglethorpe women had used their wit and beauty through three generations for a lost cause. They were not more lucky with the best intentions than Eleanor's grandson the Prince de Lambesque. With hereditary courage he rescued an old woman from a burning cottage and flung her into a duck pond to extinguish her blazing clothes. The old woman was drowned. Not long ago a lady of much wit but of no occult pretensions and wholly ignorant of the Oglethorpes looked over the Westbrook place then vacant with the idea of renting it. On entering it she said I have a feeling that very interesting things have happened here. Probably they had. End of chapter 10