he placed at a boarding-school in the adjacent town. He seldom saw her;
the intercourse between the father and daughter being principally carried
on through Mary Strugnell, a widow of about thirty years of age, and a
native of the place. She was engaged as a servant to Mr. Wilson, and
seldom left Craig Farm except on Sunday afternoons, when, if the weather
was at all favorable, she paid a visit to an aunt living in the town;
there saw Miss Wilson; and returned home usually at half-past ten
o'clock--later rather than earlier. Armstrong was occasionally absent
from his home for several days together, on business, it was rumored, for
Wilson; and on the Sunday in the first week of January 1802, both he and
his wife had been away for upwards of a week, and were not yet returned.

About a quarter-past ten o'clock on that evening the early-retiring
inhabitants of the hamlet were roused from their slumbers by a loud,
continuous knocking at the front door of Armstrong's house: louder and
louder, more and more vehement and impatient, resounded the blows upon
the stillness of the night, till the soundest sleepers were awakened.
Windows were hastily thrown open, and presently numerous footsteps
approached the scene of growing hubbub. The unwonted noise was caused,
it was found, by Farmer Armstrong, who accompanied by his wife, was
thundering vehemently upon the door with a heavy black-thorn stick.
Still no answer was obtained. Mrs. Strugnell, it was supposed, had not
returned from town; but where was Mr. Wilson, who was almost always at
home both day and night? Presently a lad called out that a white sheet
or cloth of some sort was hanging out of one of the back windows. This
announcement, confirming the vague apprehensions which had begun to
germinate in the wise heads of the villagers, disposed them to adopt a
more effectual mode of obtaining admission than knocking seemed likely
to prove. Johnson, the constable of the parish, a man of great
shrewdness, at once proposed to break in the door. Armstrong, who, as