irly. At length the proper order was applied for, and his body
was disinterred. On examination, enough arsenic to have poisoned three
men was found in his stomach. The wife was accused of murdering him, was
tried, convicted on the clearest evidence, and hanged. Very shortly
after she had suffered capital punishment, horrible stories of a ghost
were widely circulated. Certain people declared that they had seen a
ghastly resemblance of the murderess, robed in her winding-sheet, with
the black mark of the rope round her swollen neck, standing on stormy
nights upon her husband's grave, and digging there with a spade in
hideous imitation of the actions of the men who had disinterred the
corpse for medical examination. This was fearful enough--nobody dared go
near the place after nightfall. But soon, another circumstance was
talked of, in connexion with the poisoner, which affected the
tranquillity of people's minds in the village where she had lived, and
where it was believed she had been born, more seriously than even the
ghost-story itself.

Near the church of this village there was a well, celebrated among the
peasantry of the district for one remarkable property--every child
baptized in its water (with which the church was duly supplied on
christening occasions) was secure from ever being hanged. No one doubted
that all the babies fortunate enough to be born and baptized in the
parish, though they might live to the age of Methuselah, and might
during that period commit all the capital crimes recorded in the
"Newgate Calendar," were still destined to keep quite clear of the
summary jurisdiction of Jack Ketch--no one doubted this, until the story
of the apparition of the murderess began to be spread abroad. Then,
awful misgivings arose in the popular mind. A woman who had been born
close by the magical well, and who had therefore in all probability been
baptized in its water like her neighbours of the parish, had
nevertheless been publicly and unquestionably hanged. However,
probability was not always truth--everybody determined that the
baptismal register of the poisoner should be sought for, and that it
should be thus officially ascertained whether she had been christened
with the well water, or not. After much trouble, the important document
was discovered--not where it was first looked after, but in a
neighbouring parish vestry. A mistake had been made about the woman's
birthplace--she had not been baptized in the loca