Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/417

Rh a good sample. Mr. Podmore naturally answered that the evidence is at third-hand, and that nobody professed to have seen the official document. On October 21-November 4, 1906, Mr. Solovovo wrote to Mr. Podmore from St. Petersburg, saying that he had applied to the Lutheran Consistory at Riga, on Feb. 4-16, 1899, and, on Feb. 19-March 4, received a reply. In the archives of the Consistory of Oelsen (and in those of the church in Ahrensburg, as Mr. Solovovo found) were no documents about the disturbances of the coffins. The Ober-pastor of the church (that of St. Laurentius) added that the present Baron Buxhoewden, owner of the chapel, some years ago, had "failed to find anything either at Ahrensburg or at Riga."

Are we to conclude that Mr. Dale Owen's Baron de Guldenstubbé invented (or rather plagiarised) the whole story, so rich as it is in detail? I could not take it on me to say that; for the document, if it existed, was one which persons of education and common sense might think it desirable to destroy, while the Buxhoewden family, on reflection, might regard it as an unpleasant record. I know how often a gap occurs in State Papers and other public records, just at the moment when we are aware that a royal murder plot, or any other shady transaction, was being arranged. The newspapers, if any, of Oelsen for 1844, ought to be consulted. It is certain that old people in the island remember the affair.

I now turn to the other and earlier version of the story. The scene is a family vault, that of the family of Chase, at the church named Christchurch, in Barbadoes.

The dates of disturbances precisely parallel to those at Ahrensburg, are from August 9, 1812, to April, 1820. The earliest printed record known to me is of 1833, in Sir J. E. Alexander's Transatlantic Sketches, vol. i., p. 161 (London, 1833).