'The man is mad,' cried I. 'I never wrote him a letter.'
'I can produce it to your face,' said he, pulling a paper from his pocket, and to my great amazement reading these lines.
'Cherubina begs that Betterton will repair to her window, at ten o'clock to-night, disguised like an Italian assassin, with dagger, cloak, and pistol. The signal is to be his singing an air under the casement, which she will then open, and he may enter her chamber.'
'I will take the most solemn oath,' cried I, 'that I never wrote a line of it. But this unhappy wretch, who is a ruffian of the first pretensions, has a base design upon me, and has followed me from London, for the purpose of effecting it; so I suppose, he wrote the letter himself, as an excuse, in case of discovery.'
'Then he shall march to the magistrate's,' said the peasant, 'and I will indict him for house-breaking!'
A man half so frantic as Betterton I never beheld. He foamed, he grinned, he grinded the remnants of his teeth; and swore that Stuart was at the bottom of the whole plot.
By this time, Mary having returned with two men, we set forward in a body to the magistrate's, and delivered our depositions before him. I swore that I did not write the letter, and that, to the best of my belief, Betterton harboured bad designs against me.
The peasant swore that he had found the culprit, armed with a knife and pistol, in his house.
The magistrate, therefore, notwithstanding all that Betterton could say, committed him to prison without hesitation.
As they were leading him away, he cast a furious look at the magistrate, and said: