should go and call on Mrs. Bargrave, who seemed to be making a great deal out of nothing. As to the little legacies which Mrs. Bargrave had mentioned in her letter that Mrs. Veal wished him to give to her friends, why. he had asked his sister on her death-bed—for she was conscious for the last four hours of her life—whether there was anything she desired to dispose of, and she had answered no. But. in spite of Mr. Veal's wrath, everyone believed in Mrs. Bargrave's tale, for they believed in Mrs. Bargrave herself. She had nothing to gain by inventing such a story, and was ready to answer all questions put to her in a plain, straightforward way.
'I asked her" said the lady from whom Defoe obtained his account. 'if she was sure she felt the gown: she answered, "If my senses are to be relied on, I am sure of it."'
'I asked her if she had heard a sound when Mrs. Veal clapped her hand upon her knee; she said she did not remember that she did. but added: "She appeared to be as much a substance as I did, who talked with her; and I may be as soon persuaded that your apparition is talking to me now as that I did not really see her, for I was under no manner of fear; I received her as a friend and parted with her as such. I would not," she concluded "give one farthing to make anyone believe it, for I have no interest in it."'
From Defoe's day to this many people have read the tale, and several have held it to be a pure invention of the novelist. But some have taken the trouble to search out the history of the persons mentioned in it, and have found that they at any rate were real, and living in Dover and in Canterbury at the very dates required by the story. In the reign of Charles I. a Bargrave had been Dean of Canterbury, and a Richard Bargrave married a widow in the church of St. Alphege in 1700. There had been also Veals connected with Canterbury, which is curious, and we find that a son of William Veal was baptised in St. Mary's, Dover, in August 1707. Now. as Mrs. Veal kept her brother's house when they moved into Dover, he must have married after his sister's death on September 7, 1705. And if we turn over the Parish Register
