Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450, page 49 by Various Authors
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hich, she said, she was shut up, was compared with the full survey of it afterwards undertaken, important and fatal discrepancies were proved. She professed to have been unable to see anything going on in the house from her place of confinement, but in the room at Enfield Wash there was a large hole through the floor for a jack-rope, which gave a full view of the kitchen, where the inmates of the house chiefly resorted. She professed to describe every article in the room she was confined in, but she had said nothing of a very remarkable chest of drawers found in that which she identified as the same. That this piece of furniture had not been recently placed there was made evident, by the damp dust gluing it to the wall, and the host of spiders which ran from their webs when it was removed. She had escaped by stepping on a penthouse, but there was none against the garret of Mrs Wells's house; the windows were high, and she could not have leaped to the ground without severe injury. She stated that no one had entered the room during the four weeks of her imprisonment, but it was shewn that, during the period, a lodger had held an animated conversation from one of the windows of the identical garret with somebody occupied in lopping wood outside. Nay, a person had seen a poor woman, with the odd name of Natis, in bed in that very room. His reason for entering it was a curious one, which has almost a historical bearing. He went to try the ironwork of a sign which had once hung in front of the house, and lay in the garret. The sign had been taken down when the Jacobite army penetrated into England in the Rebellion of 1745. Probably it had been of a character likely to be offensive to the Jacobites, and its removal is a little incident, shewing how greatly the country apprehended a revolution in favour of the Stuarts.
These discrepancies were, however, far from being the most remarkable part of the evidence. Not content with shewing that Elizabeth Canning had told falsehoods, the prosecutor set to the laborious t