Overbury
poisoned in the Tower), was the Justice of the Peace who acted
as _Juge d'Instruction_ in the case of Harrison's disappearance.[5]

[Footnote 5: Paget, _Paradoxes and Puzzles_, p. 342. Blackwoods,
1874.]

To come to the story. In 1660, William Harrison, Gent., was steward or
'factor' to the Viscountess Campden, in Chipping Campden,
Gloucestershire, a single-streeted town among the Cotswold hills. The
lady did not live in Campden House, whose owner burned it in the Great
Rebellion, to spite the rebels; as Castle Tirrim was burned by its
Jacobite lord in the '15. Harrison inhabited a portion of the building
which had escaped destruction. He had been for fifty years a servant
of the Hickeses and Campdens, his age was seventy (which deepens the
mystery), he was married, and had offspring, including Edward, his
eldest son.

On a market day, in 1659, Mr. Harrison's house was broken into, at
high noon, while he and his whole family were 'at the Lecture,' in
church, a Puritan form of edification. A ladder had been placed
against the wall, the bars of a window on the second story had been
wrenched away with a ploughshare (which was left in the room), and
140_l._ of Lady Campden's money were stolen. The robber was never
discovered--a curious fact in a small and lonely village. The times,
however, were disturbed, and a wandering Cavalier or Roundhead soldier
may have 'cracked the crib.' Not many weeks later, Harrison's servant,
Perry, was heard crying for help in the garden. He showed a
'sheep-pick,' with a hacked handle, and declared that he had been set
upon by two men in white, with naked swords, and had defended himself
with his rustic tool. It is curious that Mr. John Paget, a writer of
great acuteness, and for many years police magistrate at Hammersmith,
says nothing of the robbery of 1659, and of Perry's crazy conduct in
the garden.[6] Perry's behaviour there, and his hysterical invention
of the two armed men in white, give the key to his character. The two
men in white were never traced of course, but, later, we meet three
men not less flagitious, and even more mysterious. They appear to have
been three 'men in buckram.'

[Footnote 6: See his _Paradoxes and Puzzles_, pp. 337-370, and, for
good reading, see the book _passim_.]

At all events, in quiet Campden, adventures obviously occurred to the
unadventurous. They culminated in the following year, on August 16,
1660. Harrison left his house in the morning