Fleet prisoner; and I eagerly fastened on one statement, viz., that the old man's early childhood had been passed in the house in which Tyndale had worked on his transla tion of the Holy Scriptures. I had no great difficulty in locating the house, and I reas oned to myself that it was probable that the old Fleet prisoner had been baptized in the parish church of the village in which the house stood; that possibly his mother had belonged to that parish, had been married in that church, and had been buried in the burying-ground attached to it. Acting on that reasoning, I wrote to the clergyman of the parish, asking him to search his registers between the years 1738 and 1748 for the entries of any baptism, marriage or burial of any person by the name of X. In those days parish registers were not kept with the same care with which they are kept at the present time, and births, marriages and deaths were often entered in the same book; every genealogist will know this to be the fact. I received a most courteous reply from the rector of the parish, that his regis ters embraced the period I mentioned, and, indeed, went very much farther back; that he found no entry of any marriage, baptism or burial of any person of the name of X, but that the book had been mutilated, and the pages for the years 1739 to 1742 had been cut out; but he added that he knew a duplicate of the register book was kept at the diocesan registry, from which, perhaps, I might get supplied with the evidence which I wanted. I lost no time in writing to the
diocesan registrar, and his reply gave me the same result; his duplicate register had also been mutilated, in the same manner and for the same period. Was it an unreasonable presumption on my part, from these prem ises, that the mutilated registers contained entries of the marriage of the old Fleet pris oner's mother, William's X's first wife, in the year 1739, of the baptism of the old man, their child, in the following year, and of the burial o.f the mother in 1742; and that the mutilation of the books was the work of Mr. Z, who, by means of the contents of the abstracted pocket-book had learned where to go to carry out his purpose? And now I must disappoint my readers. Had I been writing fiction I might have drawn upon my imagination, and produced a highly-colored denotement of this interest ing story. But I am chronicling actual facts, and I have in these pages given a faithful record from memory of a deeply in teresting investigation made by me for a client, professionally, some thirty years since. I must close this story precisely at that point of the drama at which the curtain was rung down by the Supreme Manager of that little stage on which each of us poor players struts and frets his little hour, and then is heard no more. At this point of the drama I re ceived news of the sudden death of my client, the claimant; with his death, my work — which had had, as my readers may suppose, an irresistible fascination for me — came to an end.
