So listen--
MR. FETT'S STORY OF THE INTERRUPTED BETROTHAL.
"To the south of the famous city of Oxford, between it and the town
of Abingdon, lies a neat covert called Bagley Wood: in the which, on
a Sunday evening a bare two months ago, I chose to wander with my
stage copy of Mr. Otway's _Orphan_--a silly null play, sirs, if not
altogether the nonsense for which Abingdon, two nights later,
condemned it. While I wandered amid the undergrowth, conning my
part, my attention was arrested by a female voice on the summer
breeze, most pitiably entreating for help. I closed my book and bent
my steps in the direction of the outcries. Judge of my amazement
when, parting the bushes in a secluded glade, I came upon a
distressed but not uncomely maiden, buried up to her neck in earth
beneath the spreading boughs of a beech. To exhume and release her
cost me, unprovided as I was with any tool for the purpose, no little
labour. At length, however, I disengaged her and was rewarded with
her story; which ran, that a faithless swain, having decoyed her into
the recesses of the wood, had pushed her into a pit prepared by him;
and that but for the double accident of having miscalculated her
inches and being startled by my recitations of Otway into a terror
that the whole countryside was after him with hue and cry, he had
undoubtedly consummated his fell design.
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