(Vol. iv., p. 251.)
The mode of doing this, as shown by S. W. to be practised by the North
American Indians, is very common amongst ourselves. About
five-and-twenty years ago, an Eton boy, named Dean, who had lately come
to the school, imprudently bathed in the river Thames where it flows
with great rapidity under the "playing fields," and he was soon carried
out of his depth, and disappeared. Efforts were made to save him or
recover the body, but to no purpose; until Mr. Evans, who was then, as
now, the accomplished drawing-master, threw a cricket bat into the
stream, which floated to a spot where it turned round in an eddy, and
from a deep hole underneath the body was quickly drawn. This statement
is entirely from memory, but I believe it to be substantially correct.
I heard the following anecdote from the son of an eminent Irish judge.
In a remote district of Ireland a poor man, whose occupation at certain
seasons of the year was to pluck feathers from live geese for beds,
arrived one night at a lonely farmhouse, where he expected to glean a
good stock of these "live feathers," and he arose early next morning to
look after the flock. The geese had crossed the river which flowed in
front of the house, and were sitting comfortably in the sunshine on the
opposite bank. Their pursuer immediately stripped off the few clothes he
had, deposited them on the shore, and swam across the river. He then
drove the birds into the water, and, boldly following them, he
maintained a long contest to keep then together on their homeward
voyage, until in the deep bed of the river his strength failed him, and
he sank. The farmer and his family became aware of the accident, the
cries of the drowning man, and the cackling of the geese, informed them,
in the swimmer's extremity, of his fate, and his clothes lay on the
shore in witness of his having last been in their company. They dragged
the river for the body, but in vain; and in apprehension of serious
consequences to themselves should they be unable to produce the corpse,
they applied to the parish priests, who undertook to relieve them, and
to "improve the occasion" by the _performance of a miracle_. He called
together the few neighbours, and having tied a strip of parchment,
inscribed with cabalistic characters, round a wisp of straw; he dropped
this packet where the man's head was described to have sunk, and it
glided into still water where the corpse was easily discovered.