y. One wedding could not be proved.
Report stated that it had been a runaway marriage, and that the bride
and bridegroom had fled to London to be married in a City church. My
father casually heard of the name of some church where it was thought
that the wedding might have taken place. He wrote to the authorities of
that church. It had, however, ceased to exist. The church had
disappeared, but the old clerk was alive and knew where the books were.
He searched, and found the missing register, and the chain of evidence
was complete and the title to the property fully established, which was
confirmed after much troublesome litigation by the Court of Chancery.

Sometimes litigants have sought to remove troublesome entries in those
invaluable books which record with equal impartiality the entrance into
the world and the departure from it of peer or peasant. And in such
dramas the clerk frequently appears. The old man has to be bribed or
cajoled to allow the books to be tampered with. A stranger arrives one
evening at Rochester, and demands of the clerk to be shown the
registers. The stranger finds the entry upon which much depends. In its
present form it does not support his case. It must be altered in order
to meet his requirements. The clerk hovers about the vestry, alert,
vigilant. He must be got rid of. The stranger proposes various
inducements; the temptation of a comfortable seat in a cosy corner of
the nearest inn, a stimulating glass, but all in vain. There is
something suspicious about the stranger's looks and manners; so the
clerk thinks. He sticks to his elbow like a leech, and nothing can shake
him off. At length the stranger offers the poor clerk a goodly bribe if
only he will help him to alter a few words in that all-important
register. I am not sure whether the clerk yielded to the temptation.

There was a still more dramatic scene in the old vestry of Lainston
Church, where a few years previously a Miss Chudleigh had been married
to Lieutenant Hervey. This young lady, who was not remarkable for her
virtue, arrived one day at the church accompanied by a fascinating
friend who, while Mrs. Hervey examined the register, exercised her
blandishments on the clerk. She expressed much interest in the church,
and asked him endless questions about its architecture, the state of his
health, his family, his duties; and while this little by-play was
proceeding Mrs. Hervey was carefully and noiselessly cutting out the
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