gentry, “and it was his regular custom at dinner to send his compliments to Lady Cathcart, informing her that the company had the honour to drink her ladyship’s health, and begging to know whether there was anything at table that she would like to eat?  But the answer was always the same, “Lady Cathcart’s compliments, and she has everything she wants.”  Fortunately for Lady Cathcart, Colonel Maguire died in the year 1764, when her ladyship was released, after having been locked up for twenty years, possessing, at the time of her deliverance, scarcely clothes to her back.  She lost no time in hastening back to England, and found her house at Tewing in possession of a Mr. Joseph Steele, against whom she brought an act of ejectment, and, attending the assize in person, gained her case.  Although she had been so cruelly treated by Colonel Maguire, his conduct does not seem to have injured her health, for she did not die till the year 1789, when she was in her ninety-eighth year.  And, when eighty years of age, it is recorded that she took part in the gaieties of the Welwyn Assembly, and danced with the spirit of a girl.  It may be added that although she survived Colonel Maguire twenty years, she was not tempted, after his treatment, to carry out the resolution which she had inscribed as a poesy on her wedding ring.

    If I survive
    I will have five.[47]

Another disappearance and supposed imprisonment which created considerable sensation in the last century was that of Elizabeth Canning.  On New Year’s Day, 1753, she visited an uncle and aunt who lived at Saltpetre Bank, near Well Close Square, who saw her part of the way home as far as Houndsditch.  But as no tidings were afterwards heard of her, she was advertised for, rumours having gone abroad, that she had been heard to shriek out of a hackney coach in Bishopsgate-street.  Prayers, too, were offered up for her in churches and meeting-houses, but all inquiries were in vain, and it was not until the 29th of the month that the missing girl returned in a wretched condition, ill, half-starved, and half-clad.  Her story was that after leaving her uncle and aunt on the 1st of January, she had been attacked by two men in great coats, who robbed, partially stripped her, and dragged her away to a house in the Hertfordshire road, where an old woman cut off her stays, and shut her up in a room in which she had been imprisoned ever since, subsisting on bread and water, and a mince pie that her assailants had overlooked in her pocket, and ultimately, she said, she had escaped through the window, tearing her ear in doing so.