Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/427

Rh suite. The author of Death's Deeds says that Lord Combermere corroborated personally to her the account which she gives, on the authority of "a medical gentleman, a native of the island." This account enumerates four disturbances, not five, and says that (July 7, 1819) Lord Combermere sealed the vault with his official seal. In the "Memoirs and Letters of Lord Combermere" (1868), the whole story is given with copious detail, the source being a privately printed narrative by a native of the colony. This narrative is that used by the author of Death's Deeds: I have not obtained a copy.

We have heard of R. Reece, junior, who printed O. On January 4, 1864, he wrote to Major Clarke a letter on the affair; he was himself present at the opening of the vault in 1820. But now he calls "T. A. Orderson" by a new name, "The Rev. Thomas Harrison, D.D., late Rector of Christchurch." Misprints certainly cause this variation. This form of the O. version is longer, as to the 1820 affair, than O. as given in Death's Deeds.

Finally, we know, or rather we have been told, that the Ahrensburg troubles were caused by a coffined suicide. Schomburgk (1844) says nothing of a suicide in the Barbadoes case, so Baron de Guldenstubbé (1859) did not crib that from Schomburgk's book. But Reece (1864) says that the negroes in Barbadoes attributed the troubles to a suicide, Dorcas Chase (buried July 6, 1812), who "had starved herself to death owing to her father's cruelty, wherefore the other corpses were desirous to expel her." Reece adds that Colonel Chase also died by his own hand. "He was an immense man, and his coffin, which was of lead, was necessarily of prodigious weight, yet his was thrown to and fro with the greatest violence, and turned topsy-turvy. Certainly no earthquake could have been so violent as to have effected it."