by Howard Pyle
The Indians at that time, according to John’s letters, were a cause of ceaseless trouble, annoyance, and injury to the inhabitants of the less settled counties of Berks and Montgomery, “getting drunk and insulting the women.” The savages had become debauched, from the peaceful times of William Penn, by French intrigue and whiskey. At length, the French war breaking out, these troubles culminated in the usual horrible barbarities of Indian warfare, stirring John up to a most un-Quakerly burst of indignation. “I would,” he cries, “that the whole pestilent tribe were annihilated, root and branch!”
In the year 1743 John Bartram entered upon his first extensive journey into the wilderness of the Americas, for the purpose of collecting specimens for his friends and patrons in England — a journey undertaken entirely at his own cost, and on his own venture. Previous to this time he had busied himself in collecting such specimens of herbs and trees as lay in his immediate neighborhood, his furthest journeys being no more than to the Susquehanna or the forests of the Jerseys; but at this date the Province of Pennsylvania was about to enter into negotiations with the Six Nations of Indians, the place of ambassadorial meeting being in Onondaga, in New York, and Mr. Milsar was appointed ambassador, with such a suite of Indians, interpreters, and guides as he might need. This was an opportunity not to be neglected by Bartram, and accordingly all was a bustle and hum of preparation at Kingsessing. Apparatus was collected, boxes, books, and loose leaves for seed and botanical specimens, insect nets and boxes, and all the paraphernalia made necessary by an extensive expedition. Hominy and bacon were stuffed into the saddle-bags, and two huge pistols with flint-locks slung to the saddle-bow. The wife and the daughters wept, the sons shook their father’s hand in silence, and the negro servants grinned at the fine show their master made as he rattled away on his old gray mare. He plunged immediately and boldly into the wilderness just back of Philadelphia, skirting along the wild and tangled banks of the Schuylkill, until, after a day’s journey, he joined Mr. Milsar, the government agent. For days they travelled through the dense forests of the outlying settlements — forests so thick in their virgin growth that, to use Bartram’s expression, “We concluded it almost impossible to shoot a man at a hundred yards, let him stand never so fair.” Whether the man to be shot at was himself, or one of the nomadic tribes of Indians in the vicinity, he does not say.
After many such adventures they at length reached Onondaga and the Six Nations. Here were they “lustily entertained,” while the warriors, glittering with beads and gaudy with party-colored blankets, assembled from north, south, east, and west at the call of the chief at Onondaga, feasting on “corn dumplings,” venison, and hominy, and wild beans wrapped in great leaves, over which the worthy botanist gloated with appetite whetted by forest travel. From this point Bartram visited the trading town of Oswego and Fort Frontenac, and the banks of Lake Ontario to some extent, coming back with the colonial agent to Philadelphia, which he reached after three months of absence, “returning thanks to the Almighty Power that had preserved us all, and had returned me safe from a savage land to home and family again.”
This was the first journey of such extent into the then pathless wilderness that any single colonist had ever undertaken, and Bartram felt justly proud of it. This expedition seems far more interesting than one which he subsequently undertook into the Floridas — at least, while the narrative of the one abounds in adventures, the other is only a dull record of facts, comprising a list of the various plants he discovered. This might have been owing to the fact that the Southern States at that time were the most thickly populated portion of the colonies, Virginia, at the beginning of the Revolution, having a population equal to the colonies of Pennsylvania and New York conjoined; or it might have been that a new dignity which had lately descended upon him in his appointment as Royal Botanist to his Britannic Majesty George the Third had made him feel it incumbent upon him to be severely dull and dignifiedly prosy. However that may be, the record of the Southern journey is certainly not so redolent of interest as that to Onondaga. The botanist was nearly seventy years of age when he undertook this journey of several thousand miles, shipping from Philadelphia to Charleston, South Carolina. Thence he proceeded by land to St. Augustine, Florida East, from which point he explored the St. Johns River to its head waters, collecting many plants unknown at that day, and of great interest to the naturalist. In this expedition he made an accurate map of the river with its various lakes and branches, together with a chart of the width and depth of the stream at all available points — a work that was greatly approved by the Board of Trade and Plantations in England, who directed it to be published for the benefit of the new colony. It was just previous to this journey that Bartram, through the interest of his friend Collinson, received the appointment before alluded to of Royal Botanist for the Provinces — an appointment confirmed by the king, with a salary of fifty pounds sterling per annum — a small amount, indeed, in our days; but at that time English money was at a premium in America of about sixty or seventy per cent., and one penny then went nearly as far in purchasing power as a sixpence now; so that in the simple life of the oldtime colony the modest stipend was amply sufficient to ease the old botanist of all concern as to his worldly affairs, and from this time his life seems to have passed in serenity and ease. It is pleasant to think of the good old man’s pathway being smoothed for him as he passed peacefully down into the dark vale whence none return. He lived until about eighty years of age, hale and strong, his only trouble being his dread that the iron heel of the Revolutionary war might tramp through his peaceful gardens. He was spared this trouble, for all alike reverenced and loved the gentle old man. After a very brief illness, shortened, it was said, by the battle of Brandywine, which occurred just prior to his death, he passed away, leaving behind him a son to perpetuate his name and labors, and to preserve intact the Bartram Botanical Garden.
THE END
THE COCK LANE GHOST
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine Aug 1893
I.
THE world that reads is the grand high court of appeal to which we all of us may at any time apply for a reversion of sentence. For its judgments are never final; they are always tentative, and open to amendment or revision. So, though the verdict rendered a hundred and thirty years ago against the Cock Lane ghost has so far stood almost without appeal, it cannot even yet be said to be closed, for only one side of this case has been heard; and there is no truism truer than the old adage, “There are two sides to every question.”
In the early part of the year 1762 a first little spark of news was dropped that by-and-by set all London in a blaze of talk. It began first to be whispered and then to be talked of that a ghost of a strange and unusual sort had made its appearance in Cock Lane.
Cock Lane was until that time almost unknown to the great world of London, being a most obscure little vein in the great arterial system of the metropolis; a narrow, dirty little street back of St. Sepulchre’s Church, and running between Snow Hill and Giltspur Street. Upon the one side of it, and almost adjoining, was West Smithfield, where was held all the gaudy, tawdry splendor of St. Bartholomew’s Fair. Upon the other side, and not further distant, was the Old Bailey, and the accompanying gloomy, frowning, forbidding face of Newgate Prison, black, dirty, squalid.
Cock Lane was almost a connecting link between these two extremes of squalid misery and squalid gayety; and more than once in those days, had you stood at the opening of some of its crooked courts or alleyways, you might have heard upon the one side the shouting and the laughing at the fair, the piping of fifes and the drubbing of drums, the squealing of pigs and the rattling and clattering of the pork-pie dishes, the creaking of swings and merry - go - rounds, and the confused cackle and hum and grumble of the motley crowd trying to enjoy itself; while at the same time, upon the other side, you might have heard the creaking and rattling of the hangman’s cart, carrying the victims of Moloch law to the sacrificial tree at Tyburn.
In the old time, and before th
e days of modern spirit-rappings, a good, honest, old-fashioned ghost was generally thought to haunt either some old, mossy, mildewed country house, or else the gloomy recesses of a crumbling castle — the scene, perhaps, of some mysterious legendary crime or other. But this particular ghost of Cock Lane was one of a more modern fancy. It was of the spiritualistic order of our days, and was in advance of its times. So, instead of preferring any such out-of-the-way scene for its doings, it chose this place — the heart of the metropolis, and the midst of a busy, jostling, noisy, tatterdemalion crowd — to make its intangible presence heard. The chosen place of its manifestation was the house of Mr. Parsons, the clerk of the neighboring church of St. Sepulchre’s: and its chosen medium was the clerk’s daughter, a girl of twelve years of age — a little, mischievous, spiteful, impish creature, if we may trust the faint, evanescent image that stands dimly out from the mists of the past.
Though it was not until 1762 that the town at large took up the matter of the famous ghost, the presence of something mysterious in the house of the clerk in Cock Lane was known of in the neighborhood for some time before. To take a step still further backward, in 1759 a young widower (known in the annals of the Cock Lane ghost indifferently as Mr. Kempe or Kent), who was at that time living at Greenwich — then a semi-rural suburb of London—” employed,” says a record in the case, “an agent to carry a letter to a young gentlewoman of reputable family in Norfolk.” It was his deceased wife’s sister, and the letter contained a final plea that, in spite of the law against their legal union, they should live together as man and wife. By way of answer, the young gentlewoman came up in person to Greenwich in a postchaise, “and was received most affectionately by Mr. Kent.” No attempt at any sort of marriage ceremony was gone through with, but each of the two made a will in favor of the other of all he or she possessed.
One morning Mr. Parsons, who, as was said, was the officiating clerk of St. Sepulchre’s, observed at early prayers a lady and gentleman of very genteel appearance standing in the aisle, and seeing them to be strangers, ordered them to a convenient pew. It was Mr. Kent and the young gentlewoman from Norfolk. After prayers the gentleman took occasion to thank the clerk for his courtesy, and entering into conversation with him, asked him if he knew of any convenient house in the neighborhood where he and his lady might find lodgings.
Mr. Parsons offered lodgings in his own house, which the other very gladly accepted, and very soon he and the young lady removed thither.
For some time the couple lived pleasantly and intimately at the clerk’s house, and constant visits and friendly offices were exchanged.
The young lady — Miss Fanny she was called by the family — seemed to take a particular liking to the little daughter of her landlord, and once, when Mr. Kent was away in the country to attend a wedding, she had the child to bed with her for companionship.
It was upon this occasion that the ghost for the first time made itself audible. In the morning Miss Fanny complained to the family that both she and the little girl had been very greatly disturbed throughout the night by loud and continuous noises. She described it as an alternate rapping and scratching of a peculiar kind (afterward described as being like the sound of a cat clawing a cane-bottom chair), which seemed to proceed now from the bedstead, and now from the wainscot of the adjoining wall.
After a great many speculations and surmises, Mr. Parsons advanced the theory that the noise must have been occasioned by a neighboring shoemaker, an industrious fellow, who used sometimes to work far into the small hours of the night, and for the time no more was thought of the matter. But a few days later the young lady said, “Pray, Mr. Parsons, does your industrious shoemaker work upon Sundays as well as upon other days?”
“No,” said Mr. Parsons. “Why do you ask?”
“Because,” said she, “that noise that we heard was greater last night than ever before.”
From that time the noises continued intermittently, becoming now more violent, and now ceasing altogether, but occurring always in the room where the child lay. The matter became the talk of the neighborhood, but for the time no investigation seems to have been made.
Some little time after these manifestations had first occurred Mr. Kent quarrelled with his landlord, and he and the young lady removed to other lodgings in the neighborhood of Clerkenwell. Within a few months after this last removal of the couple the young gentlewoman died rather suddenly, and was interred in the crypt at St. John’s.
After their removal the mysterious noises that had disturbed the clerk’s house ceased entirely. Nearly two years passed, and then, suddenly and without warning, the same scratching and the same rapping began again — this time with more persistence and violence — and, as before, always haunted the bedroom of the child.
At the time of their first coming she seems to have given little or no thought to them; now it appears to have occurred to her that there was something maybe supernatural connected with them. At their recurrence she was thrown into such violent fits of agitation that a woman of the neighborhood — one Mary Fraser — was called in to stay with her. It seemed to be chiefly through her ingenuity that the idea originated of putting queries to the ghost — as the manifestation was now generally called — to be answered yes or no by a series of taps negative or affirmative, after the manner of our modern spirit-rappings.
This was, perhaps, the first record of any such communication being held with the unseen world, and the result was amazing. By means of affirmative or negative taps or scratchings, the people on this side of the veil of life were informed by the people on the other side that Mr. Kent had poisoned his sister-in-law with red arsenic (a substance perhaps never before heard of, unless it was known in the great unseen world that lies beyond), which he had administered in a mug of purl. Upon being further questioned, the spirit proclaimed itself as being none other than Miss Fanny herself, who took this means of coming back to the world that she might bring justice upon her murderer.
II.
It is impossible to conceive of the blaze of excitement that the news of this manifestation caused in the neighborhood — a blaze that in the end spread to all the extremities of London — nay, the country at large — to Scotland, to Ireland, and even to the Continent. No doubt if Mr. Parsons and the others concerned in the matter had realized the hubbub that his ghost was destined to raise about his ears, he would have been chary enough in spreading the report of its doings. But as it was, the little spark was dropped, and instantly the wildfire spread far beyond his power to circumscribe. Maybe the excitement would have died out as quickly as it had flashed up, extending no further than Cock Lane, had not other and confirmatory circumstances added fuel to the blaze. The child herself, when questioned by the neighbors asserted again and again that she had seen the figure of a woman surrounded by a blazing light; and the story of this miraculous vision was further confirmed by a publican in the neighborhood, who asserted that he also had seen the bright figure of a woman upon the stairs one night, presumably in the house of Parsons. The figure, he said, had beckoned him to follow her, when, in his agitation, he had (a delicious circumstantial detail) dropped his pot of beer, and had run all the way home.
Then the further circumstance of Miss Fanny’s having made her will at Greenwich in favor of Mr. Kent was remembered, and finally it became known that at the time of the funeral of the poor young gentlewoman in the crypt of St. John’s, her sister, who had come from the country for the purpose of attending the ceremony, was much surprised at not seeing Fanny’s name upon the coffin plate. She had questioned “Mr. Browne” concerning the matter after the funeral was over, and had lamented that she had not been permitted to see her sister’s face, the lid having been screwed down before she came. It was also known that this sister had spoken very bitterly of Mr. Kent, saying that by means of the Greenwich will he had availed himself of the young lady’s fortune, “to the prejudice of her brother and sisters, who had all lived in perfect harmony until this unhappy affai
r happened.”
It was, no doubt, the coincidence of these circumstances that first gave a color of plausibility to the tale of the ghost. Anyhow, the curiosity of London itself began to stir and awaken.
The Methodists, under the lead of the benevolent Lord Dartmouth, seem to have been the first to thrust their fingers into the clerk’s private ghostly affairs. At that time a considerable faction of this sect were rather inclined to spiritualism. There was not only a deal of talk and questioning concerning the — to say at least — curiously strange phenomena that Mr. John Wesley had experienced, but a deal of belief in these phenomena, and to those who thus believed it seemed quite possible that spirits could come back from the other world to manifest themselves for more or less rational causes to men in this world. To such it would have been indeed a triumphant vindication of what Mr. Wesley had asserted as to his own experiences, if a soul from the unseen world should come to bring the vengeance of God upon a murderer, and they were ready to give credence to the tale.
Upon the other hand, though the regular clergy were much more disposed to stand aloof, yet among them also were a number, chiefly in the purlieus of St. Sepulchre’s, who were not disinclined to listen seriously. One of the accounts of the affair tells us that one night between eleven and twelve, the noises being particularly violent, a “respectable clergyman” (probably the Mr. Moore, curate of St. Sepulchre’s, who afterward figured so prominently in the case) was sent for by Mr. Parsons to investigate into the matter. He himself not caring to render an immediate decision, two other clergymen and some twenty others were called in, and a regular series of questions was put to the ghost. There is something so solemnly and so grotesquely funny in this examination of the supernatural visitant that the temptation to repeat it in full is not to be resisted.