_Traditions from remote Periods through few Links_ (Vol. iii., p.
206.).--The communication of H. J. B., showing how a subject of our beloved
Queen Victoria can, with the intervention, as a lawyer would say, of "three
lives," connect herself with one who was a liegeman of that very dissimilar
monarch, Richard III., reminds me of a fact which I have long determined in
some way to commit to record. It is this: My father, who is only
sixty-eight years old, is connected in a similar mode with a person who had
the plague during the prevalence of that awful scourge in the metropolis in
the year 1665, with the intervention of _one_ life only. My grandfather,
John Lower of Alfriston, co. Sussex, distinctly remembered an aged woman,
who died at the adjacent village of Berwick at about ninety, and who had,
in her fourth year, recovered from that frightful disease. Should it please
Providence to spare my father's life to see his eighty-third birthday, the
recollections of three persons will thus connect events separated by a
period of two centuries.
I may take this opportunity of mentioning a fact which may interest such of
the readers of "NOTES AND QUERIES" as are students of natural history. My
grandfather, who was born in the year 1735 (being the son of Henry Lower,
born on the night of the memorable storm of November, 1703), was among the
very last of those who engaged in the sport of _bustard-hunting_ in the
South Downs. This bird has been extinct, on at least the eastern portion of
that range, for upwards of a century. The sport was carried on by means of
dogs which hunted down the poor birds, and the sticks of the human (or
_in_human?) pursuers did the rest. My ancestor was "in at the death" of the
last of the bustards, somewhere about 1747, being then twelve years old.