and that her mother gave her some wine, which however she was unable to swallow.
Now in those times both lawyers and judges were apt to be very careless, and according to our ideas, very dishonest, and Chitty seems to have been no better than the rest. He took, he says, a few notes of the interview with Elizabeth for his own memorandum, but 'not thinking it would have been the subject of so much inquiry later, did not take it so distinct as he could wish.' Even this paper which he did show was not what he had written down at the time when the girl was telling her story, but something that he had pieced together from her own account and that of various other people who had been present at her mother's two nights before, and had gone with her to the Alderman. So that no court of law in these days would have thought that Alderman Chitty's account given more than a year later, of what Elizabeth told him, was to be trusted. In the end, however, Chitty, who declares he had examined her for an hour and asked her 'many questions not set down' in his paper, granted a warrant for the arrest of one Mother Wells at Enfield Wash, for assaulting and robbing her. Elizabeth herself expressly says she 'could tell nothing of the woman's name,' though 'she believed she should know her;' but one of Mrs. Canning's visitors on the night of the girl's arrival, who was acquainted with Enfield, was certain that the house described could only be that in which Mother Wells lived, and on his information Chitty allowed the warrant for her arrest to be made out.
This man, Robert Scarrat, seems to have put to Elizabeth a great many questions which never occurred to the Alderman. He asked her, for instance, to describe the woman who had cut off her stays, and she replied that she was 'tall, black and swarthy, and that two girls, one fair and one dark, were with her.' This answer surprised him; it was not what he expected. Mother Wells was not a tall, swarthy woman, and he said at once that it could not have been Mother Wells at all, as the description was not in the least like her.
On Thursday February 1, Elizabeth was put into a coach and drove with her mother and two other women to Mother
