She was executed amid the greatest excitement throughout the metropolis; and on a warm July day she was borne, amid the sorrowing faces of ten thousand spectators, and her pall upheld by six young girls robed in white, from her humble home to the grave yard of the Foundling Hospital. One who lived amid those scenes wrote, long after: "Poor Eliza Fenning! So young, so fair, so innocent! Cut down even in thy morning with all life's brightness only in its dawn! Little did it profit thee that a city mourned over thy early grave, and that the most eloquent men did justice to thy memory!"
For more than half a century the guilt or innocence of Eliza Fenning was a disputed point Then the confession of the real murderer came out, and her innocence was established beyond a doubt.
DREAMS BEFORE THE LAW COURTS.
IN the year 1695 a Mr. Stockden was robbed and murdered in his own house in the parish of Cripplegate. There was reason to believe that his assailants were four in number. Suspicion fell on a man named Maynard, but he succeeded at first in clearing himself. Soon afterwards a Mrs. Greenwood voluntarily came forward and declared that the murdered man had visited her in a dream, and had shown her a house in Thames Street, saying that one of the murderers lived there. In a second dream he displayed to her a portrait of Maynard, calling her attention to a mole on the side of his face (she had never seen the man), and instructing her concerning an acquaintance who would be, he said, willing to betray him. Following up this information, Maynard was committed to prison, where he confessed his crime and impeached three accomplices. It was not easy to trace these men; but Mr. Stockden, the murdered man, again opportunely appeared in Mrs. Greenwood's dreams, giving information which led to the arrest of the whole gang, who then freely confessed and were finally executed. The story is related by the curate of Cripplegate, and "witnessed" by Dr. Sharp, then Bishop of York. On this story, be it remarked that Mrs. Greenwood's dreams only verified suspicions already aroused. Maynard had been suspected at first; her dream brought home the guilt to him. It did not deal with his accomplices until Maynard, in his turn, had implicated them.
A somewhat similar incident came before a legal tribunal nearly a century afterwards, when two Highlanders were arraigned for the murder of an English soldier in a wild and solitary mountain district known as "the Spital of Glenshee." In the course of the "proof for the Crown," to use the phrase of Scottish law, another Highlander, one Alexander McPherson, deposed that on one night an apparition appeared to come to his bedside, and announced itself as the murdered soldier, Davies, and described the precise spot where his bones would be found, requesting McPherson to search for and bury them. He fulfilled but the first part of the behest, whereupon the dream or apparition came back, repeated it, and called its murderers by their names.
It appears that, with the strangely stern common-sense which in Scotland exists side by side with the strongest imaginative power, the prisoners were acquitted principally on account of this evidence, whose "visionary" nature threw discredit on the whole proceedings. One difficulty lay in the possibility of communication between the murdered man and the dreamer, since the one spoke only English and the other nothing but Gaelic! Years afterwards, however, when both the
