Page:The strange story book.djvu/303

 THE STRANGE STORY OF ELIZABETH CANNING

you fond of puzzles? I am. And here is a mystery which all sorts of people have been seeking to explain for a hundred and fifty years, and nobody, not even the lawyers who have studied it, can make up their minds. So now it is your turn to try.

In the year 1752 Elizabeth Canning was a girl of seventeen, the eldest of a family of five children. Her mother was a widow and very poor, so she was glad when Elizabeth or Betty, as her friends called her, was old enough to go out to service. Betty was a steady, hard-working young woman, and the neighbours who had known her from a baby were all ready to help her and to get her a suitable place.

Her first master was a respectable man who kept a tavern, and in his house she lived for eighteen months. But she did not serve the customers, or come into the rooms where they drank. She then left to go as servant to a carpenter and his wife named Lyon, in Aldermanbury in the City of London, not very far from her own home. The Lyons were also old acquaintances of Mrs. Canning, and had known Elizabeth since she was two. Now she was grown up; a rather short, pleasant-looking girl with a fresh complexion marked with small-pox, but not pretty.

Elizabeth had been with the Lyons for three months, and had pleased them so well that they promised her a holiday on New Year's Day 1753, to go to see her uncle and aunt, living behind the London Docks. So on New Year's Day, the girl got up earlier than usual, in order to get her work over as soon as possible. When everything was done, she went up to her attic and took her best clothes out of a chest. She was a long time dressing, but when she stepped out into the street,

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