“To the south of the famous city of Oxford, between it and the town of Abingdon, lies a neat covert called Bagley Wood:  in the which, on a Sunday evening a bare two months ago, I chose to wander with my stage copy of Mr. Otway’s Orphan—­a silly null play, sirs, if not altogether the nonsense for which Abingdon, two nights later, condemned it.  While I wandered amid the undergrowth, conning my part, my attention was arrested by a female voice on the summer breeze, most pitiably entreating for help.  I closed my book and bent my steps in the direction of the outcries.  Judge of my amazement when, parting the bushes in a secluded glade, I came upon a distressed but not uncomely maiden, buried up to her neck in earth beneath the spreading boughs of a beech.  To exhume and release her cost me, unprovided as I was with any tool for the purpose, no little labour.  At length, however, I disengaged her and was rewarded with her story; which ran, that a faithless swain, having decoyed her into the recesses of the wood, had pushed her into a pit prepared by him; and that but for the double accident of having miscalculated her inches and being startled by my recitations of Otway into a terror that the whole countryside was after him with hue and cry, he had undoubtedly consummated his fell design.  After cautioning her to be more careful in future I parted from the damsel (who to the last protested her gratitude) and walked homeward to my lodgings, on the way reflecting how frail a thing is woman when matched against man the libertine.”

Billy Priske’s eyes had grown round in his head.  Mr. Badcock, after sitting in thought for a full minute, observed that the incident was peculiar in many respects.

“Is that the end of the yarn?” I asked.

“I never met the lady again,” confessed Mr. Fett.  “As for the story,” he added with a sigh, “I am accustomed to have it disbelieved.  Yet let me tell you this.  On my return I related it to the company, who received it with various degrees of incredulity—­all but a youthful stroller who had joined us at Banbury and earned promotion, on the strength of his looks, from ‘walking gentleman’ to what is known in the profession as ‘first lover.’  On the strength of this, again, he had somewhat hastily aspired to the hand of our leading tragedy lady—­a mature person, who knew her own mind.  My narrative seemed to dispel the atmosphere of gloom which had hung about him for some days; and the next morning, having promised to accompany his betrothed on a stroll up the river bank, he left the inn with a light, almost jaunty, tread.  From the balcony I watched them out of sight.  By-and-by, however, I spied a figure returning alone by the towpath; and, concealing myself, heard young Romeo in the courtyard carelessly demanding of the ostler the loan of a spade.  From behind my curtain I watched him as again he made his way up the shore with the implement tucked under his arm.  I waited in a terrible suspense.  Each minute