some years ago. In the January only of this very
year (1867), William Ashford, the brother of the
murdered girl, and for many years a fish-hawker,
was found dead in his bed in New John-street,
Birmingham. He was seventy years old. The
causes of Mary Ashford's death, only the Last
Day can now reveal.

THE BOTATHEN GHOST.

THERE was something very painful and
peculiar in the position of the clergy in the west
of England throughout the seventeenth century.
The church of those days was in a transitory state,
and her ministers, like her formularies, embodied
a strange mixture of the old belief with the new
interpretation. Their wide severance also from
the great metropolis of life and manners, the
city of London (which in those times was
civilised England, much as the Paris of our own
day is France), divested the Cornish clergy in
particular of all personal access to the
masterminds of their age and body. Then, too, the
barrier interposed by the rude rough roads of
their country, and by their abode in wilds that
were almost inaccessible, rendered the existence
of a bishop rather a doctrine suggested to their
belief than a fact revealed to the actual vision of
each in his generation. Hence it came to pass
that the Cornish clergyman, insulated within
his own limited sphere, often without even the
presence of a country squire (and unchecked
by the influence of the fourth estate, for until
the beginning of this nineteenth century,
Flindell's Weekly Miscellany, distributed from house
to house from the pannier of a mule, was the
only light of the west), became developed about
middle life into an original mind and man,
sole and absolute within his parish boundary,
eccentric when compared with his brethren in
civilised regions, and yet, in German phrase, "a
whole and seldom man" in his dominion of souls.
He was "the parson," in canonical phrase: that
is to say, The Person, the somebody of
consequence among his own people. These men were
not, however, smoothed down into a monotonous
aspect of life and manners by this remote and
secluded existence. They imbibed, each in his
own peculiar circle, the hue of surrounding
objects, and were tinged into distinctive colouring
and character by many a contrast of scenery
and people. There was "the light of other
days," the curate by the sea-shore, who
professed to check the turbulence of the
"smugglers' landing" by his presence on the sands,
and who "held the lantern" for the guidance
of his flock when the nights were dark, as the
only proper ecclesiastical part he could take in
the proceedings. He was soothed and silenced
by the gift of a keg of Hollands or a chest
of tea. There was the merry minister of
the mines, whose cure was honeycombed
by the underground men. He must needs
have been artist and poet in his way, for he
had to enliven his people, three or four times
a year, by mastering the arrangements of a
guary, or religious mystery, which was duly
performed in the topmost hollow of a green
barrow, or hill, of which many survive, scooped
out into vast amphitheatres and surrounded by
benches of turf, which held two thousand
spectators. Such were the historic plays, The
Creation, and Noe's Flood, which still exist in
the original Celtic as well as the English text,
and suggest what critics and antiquaries these
Cornish curates, masters of such revels, must
have been; for the native language of
Cornwall did not lapse into silence until the end
of the seventeenth century. Then, moreover,
here and there would be one parson more
learned than his kind in the mysteries of a
deep and thrilling lore of peculiar fascination.
He was a man so highly honoured at college
for natural gifts and knowledge of learned books
which nobody else could read, that when he
"took his second orders" the bishop gave him
a mantle of scarlet silk to wear upon his
shoulders in church, and his lordship had
put such power into it that when the parson
had it rightly on he could "govern any
ghost or evil spirit," and even, "stop an
earthquake."

Such a powerful minister, in combat with
supernatural visitations, was one Parson Rudall,
of Launceston, whose existence and exploits we
gather from the local tradition of his time, from
surviving letters and other memoranda, and,
indeed, from his own "Diurnal," which fell by
chance into the hands of the present writer.
Indeed, the legend of Parson Rudall and the
Botathen Ghost will be recognised by many
Cornish people as a local remembrance of their
boyhood.

It appears, then, from the diary of this learned
master of the grammar school—for such was his
office, as well as perpetual curate of the parish—
"that a pestilential disease did break forth in our
town in the beginning of the year A.D. 1665; yea,
and it likewise invaded my school, insomuch that
therewithal certain of the chief scholars sickened
and died." " Among others who yielded to the
malign influence, was Master John Eliot, the
eldest son and the worshipful heir of Edward
Eliot, Esquire, of Trebursey, a stripling of
sixteen years of age, but of uncommon parts and
hopeful ingenuity. At his own especial motion
and earnest desire, I did consent to preach his
funeral sermon." It should be remembered here
that, howsoever strange and singular it may
sound to us, that a mere lad should formally
solicit such a performance at the hands of his
master, it was in consonance with the habitual
usage of those times. The old services for the
dead had been abolished by law, and in the stead
of sacrament and ceremony, month's mind and
year's mind, the sole substitute which survived
was the general desire "to partake," as they
called it, of a posthumous discourse replete
with lofty eulogy and flattering remembrance
of the living and the dead. The diary proceeds:
"I fulfilled my undertaking, and preached over
the coffin in the presence of a full assemblage
of mourners and lachrymose friends. An ancient