A few days afterwards, Mr. Fox came to dine with them as usual. After dinner, the guests began to amuse each other with extraordinary anecdotes, and Lady Mary said she would relate to them a remarkable dream she had lately had. I dreamt, said she, that as you, Mr. Fox, had often invited me to your house, I would go there one morning. When I came to the house, I knocked at the door, but no one answered. When I opened the door, over the hall I saw written, "Be bold, be bold, but not too bold." But, said she, turning to Mr. Fox, and smiling, "It is not so, nor it was not so." Then she pursued the rest of the story, concluding at every turn with, "It is not so, nor it was not so," till she came to the discovery of the room full of bones, when Mr. Fox took up the burden of the tale, and said:
It is not so, nor it was not so,
And God forbid it should be so!
which he continued to repeat at every subsequent turn of the dreadful story, till she came to the circumstance of his cutting off the young lady's hand, when, upon his saying, as usual,
It is not so, nor it was not so,
And God forbid it should be so!
Lady Mary retorts by saying,
But it is so, and it was so,
And here the hand I have to show!
at the same moment producing the hand and bracelet from her lap. Whereupon the guests drew their swords, and instantly cut Mr. Fox into a thousand pieces.
[THE OXFORD STUDENT.]
[Obtained in Oxfordshire from tradition.]
Many years ago there lived at the University of Oxford a young student, who, having seduced the daughter of a tradesman, sought to conceal his crime by committing the more heinous one of murder. With this view, he made an appointment to meet her one evening in a secluded field. She was at the rendezvous considerably before the time agreed upon for their meeting, and hid herself in a tree. The student arrived on the spot shortly afterwards, but what was the astonishment of the girl to observe that he commenced digging a grave. Her fears and suspicions were aroused, and she did not leave her place of concealment till the student, despairing of her arrival, returned to his college. The next day, when she was at the door of her father's house, he passed and saluted her as usual. She returned his greeting by repeating the following lines: