the dead lay entombed; and that one bore out his statement that never a
knock had been heard. The girl was urged to confess, but persisted in
her assertions that the ghost was in nowise of her making.

Afterward, when the knocking had been resumed under more favorable
auspices, word came from the unseen world that the fiasco in the church
was ascribable to the very good reason that Knight had caused his wife's
coffin to be secretly removed. "I will show them!" cried the desperate
man. With clergyman, sexton, and undertaker, he visited the vaults once
more and not only identified but opened the coffin.

Meanwhile all London was flocking to Cock Lane as to a raree-show, on
foot, on horseback, in vehicles of every description. Some, like the
celebrated Dr. Johnson who took part in the coffin opening episode in
Clerkenwell, were animated by scientific zeal; but idle curiosity
inspired the great majority. The gossiping Walpole, in a letter to his
friend Montagu, has left a graphic picture of the stir created by the
newspaper reports.

"I went to hear it," he writes; "for it is not an apparition but an
audition. We set out from the opera, changed our clothes at
Northumberland House, the Duke of York, Lady Northumberland, Lady Mary
Coke, Lord Hertford, and I, all in one hackney coach, and drove to the
spot; it rained in torrents; yet the lane was full of mob, and the house
so full we could not get in; at last they discovered it was the Duke of
York, and the company squeezed themselves into one another's pockets to
make room for us. The house, which is borrowed, and to which the ghost
has adjourned, is wretchedly small and miserable; when we opened the
chamber, in which were fifty people with no light but one tallow candle
at the end, we tumbled over the bed of the child to whom the ghost
comes, and whom they are murdering by inches in such insufferable heat
and stench. At the top of the room are clothes to dry. I asked if we
were to have rope dancing between the acts. We heard nothing; they told
us (as they would at a puppet show) that it would not come that night
till seven in the morning, that is, when there are only prentices and
old women. We stayed, however, till half an hour after one."

The skepticism patent in this letter was shared by all thinking men.
Letter after letter of criticism, even of abuse, was poured into the
newspapers. No less a personage than Oliver Goldsmith wrote, under the
title of "The Mystery Rev