was in the cab with Elizabeth, would believe that Adamson had
asked 'What kind of place is it?' and that Elizabeth then spoke,
without suggestion, of the hay. The point would be crucial, but nobody
in 1754 appears to have remembered that on February 21, three weeks
after the event, at the trial of Mother Wells, Adamson had given
exactly the same evidence as in May 1754. 'I returned to meet her, and
asked her about the room. She described the room with some hay in it
... an odd sort of an empty room.'

Arriving at Mother Wells's, Elizabeth, very faint, was borne in and
set on a dresser in the kitchen. Why did she not at once say, 'My room
was up the stairs, beyond the door at the further end of the room'? I
know not, unless she was dazed, as she well might be. Next she, with a
mob of the curious, was carried into the parlour, where were all the
inmates of the house. She paid no attention to Mrs. Wells, but at once
picked out a tall old woman huddled over the fire smoking a pipe. She
did this, by the sceptical Nash's evidence, instantly and without
hesitation. The old woman rose. She was 'tall and swarthy,' a gipsy,
and according to all witnesses inconceivably hideous, her underlip was
'the size of a small child's arm,' and she was marked with some
disease. 'Pray look at this face,' she said; 'I think God never made
such another.' She was named Mary Squires. She added that on January 1
she was in Dorset--'at Abbotsbury,' said her son George, who was
present.

In 1754 thirty-six people testified to Mary Squires's presence in
Dorset, or to meeting her on her way to London, while twenty-seven, at
Enfield alone, swore as positively that they had seen her and her
daughter at or near Mrs. Wells's, and had conversed with her, between
December 18, 1752, and the middle of January. Some of the Enfield
witnesses were of a more prosperous and educated class than the
witnesses for the gipsy. Many, on both sides, had been eager to swear,
indeed, many had made affidavits as early as March 1753.

This business of the cross-swearing is absolutely inexplicable; on
both sides the same entire certainty was exhibited, as a rule, yet the
woman was unmistakable, as she justly remarked. The gipsy, at all
events, had her _alibi_ ready at once; her denial was as prompt and
unhesitating as Elizabeth's accusation. But, if guilty, she had
enjoyed plenty of time since the girl's escape to think out her line
of defence. If guilty, it was wiser to al