daughters by Lord Lyttleton. On the fata
l third day the rake, so the local tradition goes,
breakfasted in London with Mrs. Amphlett's
two daughters and some friends, was in high
spirits, and remarked confidently, "If I live
over tonight, I shall have jockeyed the ghost."
The party then ordered post horses, and set
off for Pitt-place. On their arrival his
lordship had a sharp attack of illness, but
recovered. He went early to bed, first laughingly
putting back the clock to deceive the ghost.
He then sent his valet for a spoon to stir his
medicine. On his return the servant found
that his lordship had got out of bed, and had
fallen dead on the floor. The simple fact is,
that the miserable trickster had invented the
whole story, having resolved to poison
himself. There was, therefore, no miracle in the
tolerably accurate fulfilment of a self-made
prediction. "It was no doubt singular," says Sir
Walter Scott, who was generally only too
credulous, "that a man who meditated his exit
from the world should have chosen to play
such a trick upon his friends; but it is still
more credible that a whimsical man should
do so wild a thing, than that a message should
be sent from the dead to tell a libertine at
what precise hour he should expire."

When the wells were beginning to be
disregarded, Epsom became notorious as the
resilience of Mrs. Mapp, the bone-setter, a
character whom Hogarth has immortalised in his
picture of The Consultation of Physicians.
This Mrs. Mapp was the daughter of a
Wiltshire bone-setter and sister of Polly Peachum,
whom Gay enlisted into the Beggar's Opera.
The bone-setter and the wise woman were at
this period much resorted to by English
country people, who preferred a doctor who was
also a little of the astrologer. This woman,
after wandering about the country as a sort of
privileged mad woman, suddenly became an
authority in surgery, and settled at Epsom,
where the company at the wells supplied her
with occasional dislocations. Her success,
indeed, is said to have brought her so many
patients that the people of Epsom paid her
to settle amongst them. Broken arms and
legs she dextrously set, dislocated shoulders
and elbows she refitted. Gifted with amazing
strength, she would plant her foot against
a patient's chest and drag his bones back to
their true position. "Crazy Sally" was a
dangerous woman to offend. Some surgeons,
jealous of her fame, once sent her a
"posture maker," as acrobats were then called,
with a wrist apparently dislocated. The man
groaned and screamed, but Sally felt in a
moment that the bones were in their proper
order; so, to have her revenge, she gave the
man's arm such a wrench as to dislocate it.
"Go," she said, "to the fools who sent you
and try their skill, if you like, or come back here in a
month and I'll put you straight." In her
flowery days, Mrs. Mapp, the bone-setter,
drove a carriage and four, and received as much
as twenty pounds in the day. At last Mapp,
footman to a mercer in Ludgate Hill, won by
her full purse, married her, robbed her, and
forsook her, all within the fortnight. She never
recovered this, and died in London in 1737 so
poor that she had to be buried by the parish.

The Reverend Jonathan Bouchier, who
became rector of Epsom in 1784, deserves a
word as a sturdy Royalist and a great scholar,
of whom several interesting stories are told.
Before the American war broke out, Mr.
Bouchier was rector of several parishes in Virginia
and Maryland. He once thrashed a rebel
Yankee blacksmith who had insulted his king
and country, and to the very last he persisted
boldly in preaching Royalist sermons. On one
occasion the Tory rector had been informed that
if he dared pray for King George he would be
fired at in his pulpit. Nothing daunted, the
next Sunday the resolute man ascended the
pulpit stairs armed with two horse-pistols, one
of which he laid on either side of his pulpit
cushion; with this preamble he preached an
unflinching sermon, ending with this stinging
passage:

"Unless I forbear praying for the king I
have been notified that I am to pray no longer
. No intimation could be more distressing to me;
but I do not require a moment's hesitation,
distressing as the dilemma is. Entertaining a
respect for my ordination vow, I am firm in
my resolution, whilst I pray in public at all,
to conform to the unmutilated Liturgy of my
Church, and reverencing the injunctions of the
Apostle: 'I will pray for the king and all who
are in authority under him, as long as I live.'
Yes, whilst I have my being, I will, with
Zadok, the priest, and Nathan, the prophet,
proclaim GOD SAVE THE KING." The Americans
had no heart to fire at so bold and honest a
man, and Jonathan Bouchier descended the
pulpit stairs unharmed. This learned clergyman
married a descendant of Addison's, a
very beautiful Virginian girl. A curious and
authentic instance of presentiment preceded
their first meeting. Miss Addison had dreamed
that she saw her future husband, and awoke
with a vivid remembrance of his face and
manner. The next day Mr. Bouchier called on
her father with letters of introduction, and
on Miss Addison entering the room, she saw
in the handsome stranger the lover of her
dream. This rector of Epsom devoted many
years to a completion of Johnson's Dictionary.
He left it at his death unfinished, and the
manuscript, down to the letter I, is said to
have been used by the compilers of Webster's
Dictionary.

The crow passing over Surrey on his swift
way to the sea, alights at Ashtead Park, on
one of the limes, an avenue of which
light-leafed trees was planted when William of
Orange came here to visit his loyal adherent,
Sir Robert Howard, a poor dramatist, the
prototype of Bayes, in the Duke of Buckingham's
comedy of the Rehearsal, and the Sir Positive
Atall of Shadwell's Sullen Lovers. His
romantic plays, stuffed full of extravagant
metaphors and false tropes, seem to have deserved
all the ridicule showered upon them.