By C. E. Long, Esq. 



395 



Shefford. I speak advisedly on these points, having been born and 

 bred in the neighbourhood. Is it credible, I ask, that even by 

 night (for she does not say that she was blindfolded) she should 

 not have recognised her own little market town of Hungerford, 

 five miles only from her own door, and the bridge over the Ken- 

 net, mistaking that, to her, well known stream for the broad 

 Thames? ! Incredible. 



3rd. We come next to the most preposterous part of the whole 

 story, viz. that if the lady was safely delivered, she, the midwife, 

 was to be well rewarded, whereas if the lady miscarried, poor Mis- 

 tress Barnes was to be immolated forthwith. The infant was born 

 alive; Mistress Barnes's throat was not cut; but the poor child 

 was committed to the flames ! And so we are called upon to credit 

 the fact that the tall slender gentleman in black velvet, not being 

 a lunatic at large, had such an appetite for infant cremation as, 

 unnecessarily, to enact the part of an assassin, and thereby volun- 

 teer the making of a halter for his own neck, when a miscarriage 

 would have answered his object in a perfectly honest and satisfac- 

 tory manner. But perhaps there is no accounting for whims ! 

 With these observations I am, notwithstanding these periodical 

 discoveries, almost tempted to close the case, contented to nonsuit 

 the midwife out of her own mouth. Although throughout, I have 

 not hesitated to avow my scepticism, I do not say that traditions 

 are, in all cases, to be cashiered with scorn, far from it; but we 

 well know how, in the ordinary intercourse of our every day life, 

 a story improves, and becomes embellished in its progress from 

 mouth to mouth; heightened in its colouring, enlarged, if not 

 falsified in its facts ; and so it turns out as to this Littlecote story 

 with its most mysterious beginning, its most magnified middle 

 passage, and its most abortive end. One by one the facts have 

 melted away, and nothing is left of the dish first served up by our 

 good gossip, Aubrey, and subsequently seasoned by the fire-side 

 credulity of the villagers, but this contemporaneous tale of " Mo- 

 ther Barnes," narrated eleven years anterior to DarelPs death, and 

 when Pophara, reported to have saved him from the hangman, and 

 in payment, to have got his estate, was not only no Judge, but not 



