Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/82

66 speed of light and the intangibility of a vapour, through the cart of the astonished higler, as if he would cut it in pieces. It is not surprising that the horse, frightened at these doings, took to his heels"]

The Manor House at Bampton was for many years occupied by a family of the name of Whittaker. About a hundred years back it appears that one of them—a married man—was "very sweet on" a maid in the town named Roberts. Mr. Whittaker's wife remonstrated with him in vain, and it ended in her dying of a broken heart. After her death the place was haunted by her spirit, and it was laid in a pond called Calves' Close Pond. Later on the pond dried up and Mrs. Whittaker "came again," and "so strong was the ghost" that they were obliged to lay her again, this time in a barrel of strong beer, which was walled up in the cellar There the barrel is to this day.—(Mrs. Hannah Wells, July, 1894.)

[In the year 17 14, Miss Ann Kendall, of Oxford, left the sum of £920 to trustees, in trust to pay from the interest of the amount £4 a year for life to each of six poor widows or single women, of the age of fifty or sixty, in St. Thomas's parish, Oxford, and £4 a year to the preacher of a sermon on the afternoon of Christmas Day, on condition that her grave and that of her parents in St. Thomas's Churchyard should never be removed. The money arising from this bequest is still divided, but in a somewhat different way from that directed in the will. The three "Maiden Kendalls," so the story goes, lived in an old house with latticed windows between Worcester Street and Gloucester Green, known as "Rewley House," which was standing within these twenty-five years. Latterly it was unoccupied, and the windows were broken, and an Oxford lady of my acquaintance remembers when a child being afraid to pass it for fear of seeing the Kendalls. The sisters often used to be seen, especially on the quarter-days when the charity was distributed—Lady Day, Midsummer Day, Michaelmas, and Christmas Day. Their usual haunts were, between the corner of Worcester Street and the old bridge over the ditch at the end of George Street in Holly Bush Row, now covered over by the road, along Holly Bush Row to Oseney Lane, and at the "Nuns' Walk," now called the "Ox Pens," in