Mediterranean is the
authority (ii. 35) for a very odd trial in the Court of King's
Bench, London. The logs of three ships, under Captains Barnaby,
Bristow and Brown, were put in to prove that, on Friday, 15th May,
1687, these men, with many others, were shooting rabbits on
Stromboli: that when beaters and all were collected, about a
quarter to four, they _all_ saw a man in grey, and a man in black
run towards them, the one in grey leading, that Barnaby exclaimed,
'The foremost is old Booty, my next door neighbour,' that the
figures vanished into the flames of the volcano. This occurrence,
by Barnaby's desire, they noted in their journals. They were all
making merry, on October 6, 1687, at Gravesend, when Mrs. Barnaby
remarked to her husband: 'My dear, old Booty is dead!' The captain
replied: 'We all saw him run into hell'. Mrs. Booty, hearing of
this remark, sued Barnaby for libel, putting her damages at 1000
pounds. The case came on, the clothes of old Booty were shown in
court: the date and hour of his death were stated, and
corresponded, within two minutes, to the moment when the mariners
beheld the apparition in Stromboli, 'so the widow lost her cause'.
A mediaeval legend has been revived in this example.

All these curious legal cases were, no doubt, familiar to Sir Walter
Scott. He probably had no access to an American example which was
reprinted four years after his death, by a member of the club which
he founded, the Bannatyne Club, {263} in 1836.

The evidence of the ghost-seer was republished by Mrs. Crowe, in her
Night Side of Nature. But Mrs. Crowe neither gives the facts of the
trial correctly, nor indicates the sources of the narrative. The
source was a periodical, The Opera Glass, February 3, 1827, thirty
years after the date of the trial. The document, however, had
existed 'for many years,' in the possession of the anonymous
contributor to The Opera Glass. He received it from one of the
counsel in the case, Mr. Nicholson, afterwards a judge in Maryland,
who compiled it from attested notes made by himself in court.

The suit was that of James, Fanny, Robert, and Thomas Harris,
devisees of Thomas Harris, v. Mary Harris, relict and administratrix
of James Harris, brother of Thomas, aforesaid (1798-99). Thomas
Harris had four illegitimate children. He held, as he supposed, a
piece of land in fee, but, in fact, he was only seized in tail.
Thus he could not sell or devise it, and his bro