adventure, the Rev. Mr. Home evinced a holy joy, and, in the name of his noble kinsman and of Lord Cranstoun, promised Gropptty a handsome reward for his trouble.  That gentleman, however, said he had acted solely out of gratitude to Lord Home, and wanted nothing but his outlays; so he made out an “Acct. of the Expences he had been at,” amounting, with the sum advanced by him, to eighteen pounds, for which Captain Hamilton obligingly gave him a bill upon my Lord Cranstoun.  By a singular coincidence this document of debt also remained “unsatisfied”; his lordship, after keeping it for six weeks, “returned it unpaid, and the Examt. has not yet recd. the money”!  Thus, in common with all who had any dealings with the Hon. William Henry Cranstoun, Gropptty in the end got the worse of the bargain.

While her gallant accomplice, having successfully stolen a march upon the hangman, was breathing the free air of the French seaport, Miss Blandy, in her cell in Oxford Castle, was preparing for her trial.  She had at first entrusted her defence to one Mr. Newell, an attorney of Henley, who had succeeded her late father in the office of town-clerk; but the lawyer, at one of their consultations, untactfully expressing astonishment that she should have got herself into trouble over such “a mean-looking little ugly fellow” as Cranstoun, his client took umbrage at this observation as reflecting upon her taste in lovers, dispensed with his further services, and employed in his stead one Mr. Rivers of Woodstock.  From the day of her arrest all sorts of rumours had been rife regarding so sensational a case.  She had poisoned her mother; she had poisoned her friend Mrs. Pocock—­how and when that lady in fact died we do not know; she was still in correspondence with Cranstoun; she was secretly married to the keeper’s son, a step to which the circumstances of their acquaintance left her no alternative; her fortune was being employed to bribe the authorities; the principal witnesses against her had been got out of the way; she had (repeatedly and in divers ways) escaped; finally, as she herself, with reference to these reports, complained—­“It has been said that I am a wretched drunkard, a prophane swearer, that I never went to chapel, contemned all holy ordinances, and in short gave myself up to all kinds of immorality.”  The depositions of the witnesses before the coroner were published “by some of the Friends and Relations of the Family, in order to prevent the Publick from being any longer imposed on with fictitious Stories,” but both Miss Blandy and Mr. Ford, her counsel, took great exception to this at the trial.  Pamphlets, as we shall presently see, poured from the press, and even before she appeared at the bar the first instalments of a formidable library of Blandyana, had come into being.