take place on the morrow, July 4th, notwithstanding the opposition of Dr. Gwyther. formed me that the wedding was to all you can prove is that he saw a gentleman tearing round a room like a fresh-caught wild cat, and swearing like a costermonger, and that he, the doctor, said such soothing words as did then occur to him. What Colney Hatch might have done afterwards we know not. I think, perhaps, when we have decided on the course we must pursue to bring the other three to justice, our best plan will be to subpoena Colney Hatch and see what evidence turns up. You, of course, will attend, as we have not one tittle of evidence excepting your oath." "And now," said Owain, "I want you to take out summonses for me against Hester Rhys for drugging and kidnapping, against Richard and Lizzie Benson for kidnapping, and against Dr. Colney Hatch for illegally and falsely certifying that I am insane." "Any more?" I asked. "No." “Well, then," said I, "let us take them in order. Firstly, a summons to Mrs. Rhys that she appear and answer So it was settled. Owain and Dora charge brought by you, in that she othy were duly married the next day, did illegally give you some deleterious Dr. Gwyther refused to attend, but with substance with the intention of doing his sanction I gave away the bride. you bodily harm. Now what evidence When Owain and Dorothy had started have you? Did you see her put any-on their travels, the major and myself thing into the horn? No! You drank had a long talk. He seemed hurt that a certain amount of wine which over- I did not take up Owain's case more came you. Don't be angry with me, warmly, and asked if I disbelieved his Owain, but I fear that is the view out- story. siders will take of the drugging episode. "Now as regards the kidnapping, you wish for three summonses under "The question rests entirely on Owain's this head. The legal definition of kid- unsupported evidence. He is a young napping is the offence either of stealing man of unblemished character, well children, or illegally and against their known to the gentlemen who will sit will conveying any of her Majesty's on the bench, but, unfortunately, the subjects out of her realm. These three magistrates are also aware that Owain defendants do not appear to be guilty is the scion of a mad stock, and drinkof kidnapping." ing pledges out of that accursed Helgorn is invariably the first symptom of their insanity. "Do you pretend to tell me, Mr. Jordan, that I have no redress?" Then I put the matter to him as I believed it would appear in court. Not at all, Owain; every wrong "Old Owain Rhys, our friend's has its remedy, but we must get at the grandfather, was the county member. right one, and your wrong is of such an He ratted from his party, taking with extraordinary nature that I cannot un- him several votes, and as a reward dertake to say offhand what we should was made a lord of the admiralty by do. I believe we shall have them un- the then government. He gave a great der 'false imprisonment,' but that dinner to celebrate his re-election, and seems to imply that the complainant publicly drank the toast of loyal and has been illegally confined in a prison, true to king and country out of the for the remedy is by habeas corpus. Helgorn. That night he cut his throat; You give me time to think it over, and the coroner's jury brought in a verdict we will have something done in time of temporary insanity. for the petty sessions on Monday week." "With regard to Colney Hatch there can be no difficulty." "I don't see, Owain, that you have any evidence that he signed anything; "His son Lewis absolutely refused to have anything to do with the fateful horn. Iltyd, the last squire, when quite a boy got himself into a scrape with a keeper's daughter. He denied all knowledge of the girl; her mother "It is pure imagination." I failed to shake her in cross-examination. Richard Benson swore he had never seen Captain Rhys in his life before that day. He stuck to this. Eliza Benson said that she had often seen Captain Rhys when her mistress, then Miss L'estrange, was engaged to marry him, but not since that date. then dared him to pledge his honor" Then," said Mr. Roe, "the statement from the Helgorn. He did so. For you have just heard is not true?" eighteen months afterwards Iltyd Rhys was in confinement-in point of fact, he was never afterwards perfectly sane. Now, you see, Owain, a member of this family, tells us he pledged his honor to something or other from the Helgorn, and subsequently experienced some wonderful adventures, of which he can give not one fragment of proof. Will not the verdict be hallucination ? "On the other hand, the defendant, though a woman with a story, is young, pretty, goes to church, and pays her debts. What she will say it is impossible to guess; but, mark my words, the bench will believe her. The Bensons can if they please decline to answer any questions lest they should incriminate themselves. Now, major, you must admit that it is a difficult case to fight." Difficult or not, it had to be done, and on the Monday week all the persons interested in our story were assembled in the courthouse of Abergloyne. I had obtained summonses against Hester Rhys, Richard Benson, and Eliza Benson for false imprisonment. I appeared for the plaintiff. Dr. Colney Hatch was subpoenaed by the defendants, who were represented by Mr. Roe, of the great London firm of Doe and Roe. They pleaded not guilty. Three magistrates satColonel Sheldrake in the chair, supported by Messrs. Scolton and Charrington-Lane a good bench, all men endowed with sound common sense. I put Owain in the box. He told his story much as he has since written it down. Then Mr. Roe cross-examined. He asked how long it was before the potion took effect. Owain answered, "In not more than three minutes." Mr. Roe said that his clients had elected to be tried separately, in order that the matter might be thoroughly sifted, and they were prepared to answer any questions put to them. The defendant, Hester Rhys, was sworn, and declared she had not seen Captain Owain Rhys since she had married his late brother Iltyd. William Colney Hatch swore that he was a doctor of medicine; that he had never seen or heard of Captain Rhys until he was summoned to this court. He had never been in Abergloyne before that day. He had paid great attention to toxicology, more especially to that branch of the study which dealt with narcotic poisoning, but he knew of no drug which would immediately stupefy a man and induce sleep lasting for more than twelve hours. He had listened with great interest to Captain Rhys's statements, and had no hesitation in saying that the gentleman was of unsound mind. Dr. Colney Hatch, a venerable, benevolent-looking old gentleman with long white hair and a flowing beard, gave his evidence very well indeed, and if the bench had any doubts before, this witness cleared them away. The case was dismissed. In sheer despair I asked Dr. Gwyther, Major Steinkirk, and Owain Rhys to write out very fully, exactly what they could remember concerning this mysterious case. For until we could prove where Owain spent the time between 11 P.M. on Monday, June 29th, and the morning of Friday, July 3rd, he was branded either as rogue or lunatic. Hours and hours I spent poring over these narratives, with no result. Abergloyne was odious to Owain, who had taken his young wife to London. Months passed by. Then one morning society in west Wales was horrified to hear that Mrs. Rhys had been found dead in her bed. In due course, as coroner, I held an inquest on the body. The principal witness was Eliza Benson, who proved that for years past New York. her mistress had been in the habit of ceived a letter, which is transcribed dosing herself with narcotics of all below: kinds-opium, morphia, chloral, paraldehyd, and all the other abominations with which foolish men and women tempt fate. There was no reason to suspect that this was a case either of suicide or foul play. The jury very properly brought in a verdict of "death from misadventure." So Hester Rhys was buried, and we all wondered who was heir to Abergloyne. These doubts were settled by a letter which I received from Messrs. Doe and Roe, informing me that the executors nominated by the late Mrs. Rhys were myself and their Mr. Roe, who had drawn up the will the day after the testatrix had been acquitted by the Abergloyne bench. She had left everything absolutely to her brother-in-law, Captain Owain Rhys, with the exception of a legacy of four thousand pounds to be divided between her faithful servants, Richard and Eliza Benson. Was this a tardy reparation? Mr. Roe, whom I found a very pleasant gentleman, could give no information on the subject. When Mrs. Rhys gave him instructions as to her will, she stated she had always entertained kindly feelings towards Owain, who was in her opinion of unsound mind on certain subjects, but still capable of managing his affairs with more or less success. "I She informed her solicitor that she had several times offered to share the property with him, but he refused to agree to any arrangement. suppose," ," she added, "in the ordinary course of events I shall outlive my brother-in-law; but, in case of accidents, I will bequeath him that which is really his own." SIR, On receipt of the legacy left to us by the late Mrs. Rhys, my husband, Richard Benson, and myself, travelled to this place. To-morrow we pass on elsewhere, change our names, and begin a new life, which we trust may be a better one. Before doing so we wish, as far as may be, to atone for the past. The late Hester Rhys and I were sisters, daughters of a widow by the name of Tompkinson, formerly employed in the Eleusinian Theatre, which, as you know, has long ceased to exist. Our mother was not an actress, but employed in various capacities behind the scenes. We, as little children, appeared in pantomimes, and such like. Then a gentleman (who I have often thought was the father said to have been dead) took Hester away and sent her to school for five years; but as he died without making any provision for her, she returned to mother and me. Hester, as you know, was very pretty, so, with mother's knowledge of the manager, she got on the stage in small parts, and, though never much of an actress, was popular with the public. She lived with mother and me, and, when mother died, I became her dresser. Then I married Benson, who had been a gentleman's servant, but tried acting with some success. The next thing in the story is that the Lanark Regiment, who were going to play Robinson's "Caste," wanted a Polly Eccles. Hester got the job. Captain Rhys played Old Eccles. Hettie took me with her, saying it would be fun for me. There we saw Captain Rhys for the first time, and, as you know, she got engaged to him. Then she married Mr. Iltyd, and when he died Benson and I went to live with her, for she was the kindest, best sister that could be, whatever she may have been to other people. 4303 was first published four years earlier. Since then many a book of the same type has appeared and disappeared, but White still keeps his hold upon the English mind. Though many may talk of his book without having read it Hettie heard he was going to marry me about Dr. Colney Hatch. Now I EDWARD LAWS. it through without discerning its qual ity, the fact remains that the demand for it is steadily on the increase, and that it is finding its way into the village library and the home of the working man. The name of Gilbert White is a household word with every one who loves his own incomparable country, with its thousands of villages as homely and as sheltered as Selborne. It is strange at first sight that this should be so at a time when we seem passing from a period of poetry and romance into one of stern reality, when the rural population is being drained into the towns, when the squire and the parson are going down in the world, when leisure such as White enjoyed is a rarity and almost a crime, and when the study of economic problems should be driving out of our heads the delights of wild nature or of sport. But the Englishman has always been a strange and self-contradictory creature. With all his commercial instincts and his town-bred vulgarity, his phases of stern Puritanism and political excitement, he has never yet lost that love of the country which is rooted in the life of the manor and the village. Even with the American the same passion still lives; he took it with him to New England in the seventeenth century, and the books of Mr. John Burroughs and Miss Mary Wilkins have lately made us aware how strongly it survives in him in the nineteenth. Surely the spread of the factory system, and the consequent growth of huge towns, has rather strengthened than weakened this love of all things rural. We pine for pure air, for the sight of growing grass, for the footpath across the meadow, for the stile that invites you to rest before you drop into GILBERT WHITE died a hundred the deep lane under the hazels. But years ago, June 26, 1793; the "Natural in the last century there was no need History and Antiquities of Selborne "to pine, when there was hardly a town From Macmillan's Magazine. from which a man could not escape into | possession of the English mind as sethe fields when he would, without toil- curely as the "Complete Angler," or ing through grimy suburbs where the even as "Robinson Crusoe." At the problems of economic science force distance of a century one may well ask themselves at every turn on his mind. why this is so, and what has given the In those days men loved the country book its enduring quality. This I will simply as their home, not because they try to do; but first I must say a word were shut away from it; they took it of the man himself, for I think it is in as a matter of course, and seldom wrote one characteristic of his, and one that about it. Now we mingle a touch of in these days some might call a weakself-consciousness in our passion for it, ness, that the secret of his fame is to which finds its expression in a multi- be found. tude of books. He was born in 1720 at the village which will always be associated with his name, and in which he spent almost What a literature of the fields has sprung up, since the "Natural History of Selborne " was first published! Not the whole of his long life. The conto mention the poets, from our novel- nection of his family with Selborne ists we seem almost to demand the was, however, an accidental one. His familiar descriptive background, care- grandfather, after whom he was named less too often whether they are mere Gilbert, was a fellow of Magdalen Coldaubs, or the work of a master such as lege, Oxford, and was presented by the Mr. Blackmore or Mr. Hardy. And college to the living of Selborne in then again there is an ever-increasing 1681. This Gilbert White was apparcall for books whose whole intention is ently a well-to-do man, for he left conto open our wayward eyes to country siderable bequests to the village, and sights and sounds. Since the days of doubtless inherited wealth from his White we have had Knapp, Howitt, father, who had been an eminent citiJesse, Knox, Wood, and others who zen of Oxford in the time of Cromare still readable and still read; and well. Sampson White, whom we may later, and in a higher region of litera- call the founder of the family, was a ture, we have had Kingsley, Jefferies, draper in the High Street; he had and Mr. Hamerton. To-day a score migrated to the city from Coggs near of books of the same type are published Witney, where his family had been every year; and good and bad alike settled for many generations. He was seem to find abundant readers. The mayor in 1660, and served as "butler of Selborne Society has spread all over the beer-cellar" at the coronation of the land; most of our public schools Charles II., and was knighted among boast of a natural history society, many others at that gay time. Thus I which has taken root in the very citadel may claim the recluse of Selborne as in of athleticism, and effectually holds its some sort an Oxfordshire man. own, issuing its report yearly. Neither that his own Hampshire folk may have athletics nor examinations can kill the their due, I must add that not only was old instinct of Englishmen; it is as his grandmother a Hampshire lady, strong as ever, and the scientific spirit but, if Anthony Wood is to be trusted, of the age has given it a useful turn. the family was "originally descended from the Whites of South Warnborough in Hampshire.” 1 All this literature of the country, all this youthful endeavor, may be traced back not only to the natural instincts of the English country gentleman, like so many other institutions of ours, but to the work of the first country gentleman who could shake himself free from the tyranny of books, and describe what he saw around him in simple and engaging English. White's book has taken But Apparently the love of village life was strong in the family; for John, son 1 I am indebted for these particulars to my friend the Rev. Andrew Clark, who has allowed me to consult the third volume (as yet unpublished) of his edition of Wood's "Life and Times." Since this paper was written I have seen Lord Stamford's note on the White pedigree in "Nature |