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Royal Tunbridge Wells
believed to be foreigners, had slipt by her up the Parade; when she would be in the utmost anxiety, and when they said to her, ' What are you so uneasy for, they'll soon be back again,' she would answer, ' I don't know that, for I have known more than one drop down dead before returning, and many that have slipt quite away.' "
A third extraordinary character at Tunbridge Wells was an old gentleman named Dunmall, who having devoted his youth to every kind of debauchery, had in later years become a religious maniac, and asserted that he lived under the direct influence of the Archangel Gabriel, by whose orders his every action was dictated. It was another of his delusions that he would never die, and that he had existed since the beginning of the world. Lord Chesterfield once asked him, " From the long time you have been in the world, do you remember or know anything of Jonah in the whale's belly ? " " Yes, my Lord, very well," came the startling reply; " for I was with him, and a dark place it was; and between ourselves, for a prophet, Jonah was a great coward." On another occasion he went to the Sussex Tavern, and told Jack Todd, who had built 126 |
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