In compliance with this invitation Mrs. Bostock visited Buckland, in Brecknockshire, where Sir John then was, and exerted all her miracle-working powers, but without effect.
Sir John remained inconsolable—for a while. But from his will, dated 20th June, 1760, it appears that he was then meditating a fourth marriage. He, however, died before it took place. In his will he speaks of “that dearest object of my lawful and best and purest Worldly affections, my most dear and most entirely beloved intended wife, Margaret Harries, of the parish of S. Martin, Haverfordwest, spinster.”
He died on October 28th, 1761, and was buried at Haverfordwest.
His son, Sir John Powell Pryce, sixth baronet, was an unfortunate man. Having by some accident injured his eyes, his wife applied to them a strong acid by mistake for a lotion, which entirely blinded him. But this was not all. Want of management, and wasteful living, obliged him to part with one estate after another, and at last he was thrown as a debtor into King’s Bench, where his faithful wife joined him, and spent many years with him in the prison, till he died in 1776. With his son Edward Manley the title expired.
Three miles up the Severn above Newtown are two churches without villages attached—Penstrowed and Aberhafesp—on opposite sides of the Severn.
A story is told of the latter, a modern church with very bad glass in it. Two men, hearing that he who remains in the church porch on S. Mark’s Eve will see or hear something concerning those who are to die in the course of the year, resolved to keep watch there over midnight. One of them, wearied with the day’s work, fell asleep. Presently, in the dead of night, the one who was awake heard a voice from within the church calling his fellow by name. He roused him, and said, “Let us go—it is of no use waiting longer here.”
In the course of a few weeks, there was a funeral from the opposite parish of Penstrowed, and the departed was to be buried in Aberhafesp churchyard. There is no bridge nearer than that which spans the river at Caersws, and to take the body that way would mean a journey of over five miles. It was determined, therefore, to ford the river opposite Aberhafesp Church. The person who had fallen asleep in the porch volunteered to carry the coffin across the river, and it was placed on the saddle in front of him, and, to prevent it from falling, he was obliged to grasp it with both arms.
The deceased had died of an infectious fever, and the coffin-bearer was stricken, and within a fortnight was a dead man, and was the first parishioner who died in the parish of Aberhafesp that year.
The hills fall back above the two churches and allow of a broad level basin, once the bed of a fine lake, before it was silted up at the end of the Glacial Period. Here the Afon Garno, Paranon, and Ceryst, meet the Severn at Caersws, which was an important Roman station, at the junction of several roads, and where now the Mid-Wales line falls into the Cambrian Railway.