ealed," a long pamphlet which was intended both
to explain away the disturbances and to defend the luckless Knight. The
actor Garrick dragged into a prologue a riming and sneering reference to
the mystery; the artist Hogarth invoked his genius to deride it. Yet
there were believers in plenty, and there even seem to have been some
who thought of preying on the credulous by opening up a business in
"knocking ghosts."

"On Tuesday last," one reads in _The Chronicle_, "it was given out that
a new knocking ghost was to perform that evening at a house in Broad
Court near Bow Street, Covent Garden; information of which being given
to a certain magistrate in the neighborhood, he sent his compliments
with an intimation that it should not meet with that lenity the Cock
Lane ghost did, but that it should knock hemp in Bridewell. On which the
ghost very discreetly omitted the intended exhibition."

Whether or no he took a hint from this publication, it is certain that,
finding all other means failing, Knight now resolved to try to lay by
legal process the ghost that had rendered him the most unhappy and the
most talked of man in London. Going before a magistrate, he brought a
charge of criminal conspiracy against Clerk Parsons, Mrs. Parsons, the
Parsons servant, the clergyman who had aided the servant in eliciting
the murder story from the talkative ghost, and a Cock Lane tradesman.
All of these, he alleged, had banded themselves together to ruin him,
their malice arising from the quarrel which had led him to remove to
Clerkenwell and enter a lawsuit against Parsons. The girl herself he did
not desire punished, because she was too young to understand the evil
that she wrought. Warrants were forthwith issued, and, protesting their
innocence frantically, the accused were dragged to prison.

Their conviction soon followed, after a trial of which the only
obtainable evidence is that it was held at the Guildhall before a
special jury and was presided over by Lord Mansfield. Then, "the court
desiring that Mr. K----, who had been so much injured on this occasion,
should receive some reparation,"[I] sentence was deferred for several
months. This enabled the clergyman and the tradesman "to purchase their
pardon" by the payment of some five hundred or six hundred pounds to
Knight. But the clerk either would not or could not pay a farthing, and
on him and his, sentence was now passed. "The father," to quote once
more from the meager account