seems somewhat strained. This manifestation was varied by rappings,
rustlings, banging of doors, footfalls on the stairs, and other
eerie sounds, "which greatly terrified Mr. Cranstoun." The old man
was plainly annoyed by these stories, though he merely expressed the
opinion that his guest was "light-headed." But when Cranstoun one
morning announced that he had been visited in the night, as the
clock struck two, by the old gentleman's wraith, "with his white
stockings, his coat on, and a cap on his head," Mr. Blandy "did not
seem pleased with the discourse," and the subject was dropped. But
Mary, mentioning these strange matters to the maids, expressed the
fear that such happenings boded no good to her father, and told how
Mr. Cranstoun had learned from a cunning woman in Scotland that they
were the messengers of death, and that her father would die within
the year.

Whatever weight might attach to these gloomy prognostications of the
mysterious Mrs. Morgan, it became obvious that from about that date
Francis Blandy's health began to fail. He was in the sixty-second
year of his age, and he suffered the combined assault of gout,
gravel, and heartburn. The state of irritation and suspense
consequent upon his daughter's relations with her lover must greatly
have aggravated his troubles. It was assumed by the prosecution, on
the ground of Mr. Blandy losing his teeth through decay, that he had
begun to manifest the effects of poison soon after Cranstoun left
Henley in November, 1750, but from the evidence given at the trial
it seems improbable that anything injurious was administered to him
until the receipt in the following April of that deadly present from
Scotland, "The powder to clean the pebbles with." Mr. Norton, the
medical man who attended him for several years, stated that the last
illness Mr. Blandy had before the fatal one of August, 1751, was in