her way. Nobody believes me when
I tell the following story: but 'tis true nevertheless. So listen--

MR. FETT'S STORY OF THE INTERRUPTED BETROTHAL.

"To the south of the famous city of Oxford, between it and the town
of Abingdon, lies a neat covert called Bagley Wood: in the which, on
a Sunday evening a bare two months ago, I chose to wander with my
stage copy of Mr. Otway's _Orphan_--a silly null play, sirs, if not
altogether the nonsense for which Abingdon, two nights later,
condemned it. While I wandered amid the undergrowth, conning my
part, my attention was arrested by a female voice on the summer
breeze, most pitiably entreating for help. I closed my book and bent
my steps in the direction of the outcries. Judge of my amazement
when, parting the bushes in a secluded glade, I came upon a
distressed but not uncomely maiden, buried up to her neck in earth
beneath the spreading boughs of a beech. To exhume and release her
cost me, unprovided as I was with any tool for the purpose, no little
labour. At length, however, I disengaged her and was rewarded with
her story; which ran, that a faithless swain, having decoyed her into
the recesses of the wood, had pushed her into a pit prepared by him;
and that but for the double accident of having miscalculated her
inches and being startled by my recitations of Otway into a terror
that the whole countryside was after him with hue and cry, he had
undoubtedly consummated his fell design. After cautioning her to be
more careful in future I parted from the damsel (who to the last
protested her gratitude) and walked homeward to my lodgings, on the
way reflecting how frail a thing is woman when matched against man
the libertine."

Billy Priske's eyes had grown round in his head. Mr. Badcock, after
sitting in thought for a full minute, observed that the incident was
peculiar in many respects.

"Is that the end of the yarn?" I asked.

"I never met the lady again," confessed Mr. Fett. "As for the
story," he added with a sigh, "I am accustomed to have it
disbelieved. Yet let me tell you this. On my return I related it to
the company, who received it with various degrees of incredulity--all
but a youthful stroller who had joined us at Banbury and earned
promotion, on the strength of his looks, from 'walking gentleman' to
what is known in the profession as 'first lover.' On the strength of
this, again, he had somewhat hastily aspired to the hand of our
leading tra