he did not say why) 'he went a bow's shot into
the fields,' and so back once more to Harrison's gate. He now lay for
an hour in a hen house, he rose at midnight, and again--the moon
having now risen and dispelled his fears--he started for
Charringworth. He lost his way in a mist, slept by the road-side,
proceeded in the dawn to Charringworth, and found that Harrison had
been there on the previous day. Then he came back and met Edward
Harrison on his way to seek his father at Charringworth.

Perry's story is like a tale told by an idiot, but Reed, Pierce, and
two men at Charringworth corroborated as far as their knowledge went.
Certainly Perry had been in company with Reed and Pierce, say between
nine and ten on the previous night. Now, if evil had befallen Harrison
it must have been before ten at night; he would not stay so late, if
sober, at Charringworth. Was he usually sober? The cool way in which
his wife and son took his absence suggests that he was a
late-wandering old boy. They may have expected Perry to find him in
his cups and tuck him up comfortably at Charringworth or at Ebrington.

Till August 24 Perry was detained in prison, or, odd to say, at the
inn! He told various tales; a tinker or a servant had murdered his
master and hidden him in a bean-rick, where, on search being made,
_non est inventus_. Harrison, and the rents he had collected, were
vanished in the azure. Perry now declared that he would tell all to
Overbury, and to no other man. To him Perry averred that his mother
and brother, Joan and Richard Perry, had murdered Harrison! It was his
brother who, by John Perry's advice and connivance, had robbed the
house in the previous year, while John 'had a Halibi,' being at
church. The brother, said John, buried the money in the garden. It was
sought for, but was not found. His story of the 'two men in white,'
who had previously attacked him in the garden, was a lie, he said. I
may add that it was not the lie of a sane man. Perry was conspicuously
crazy.

He went on with his fables. His mother and brother, he declared, had
often asked him to tell them when his master went to collect rents. He
had done so after Harrison started for Charringworth on the morning of
August 16. John Perry next gave an account of his expedition with his
brother in the evening of the fatal day, an account which was
incompatible with his previous tale of his doings and with the
authentic evidence of Reed and Pierce. Their hone