CORRESPONDENCE.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LIV, Issue 13557, 7 November 1907, Page 3

CORRESPONDENCE.

We are not responsible for the opinions expressed by correspondents. The writer's name, as ; at guarantee of good faith, must be enclosed in the letter. . ,[ RURAL CREDULITY. (To the Editor.) Sir,— -£)n Monday last, ,4th inst., you gave your readers a choice bit of information respecting the labouring classes in the towns and districts of Warminster and Wesbury, Wiltshire, England, 1 who have been struck 'with terror at a story which they implicitly believe about a blasphemous farmer being turned into a statue of living sione, etc., etc. Now 1 , as I happen to be a Warminster man and know- the district well, and. the sort of people that live there, I have no hesitation in characterising the story as unmitigated rot, and ytfur informant must be a very near relative, to the one who gave a contemporary a choice bit about a statue being erected m the bed of a river at Wiley, another village in Wilts, ten miles from Warminster ; and as I i spent the first five years of my married life, at Wiley and within a stones-throw of the said -statue, I claini to know something about that which/ is nothing more or less, than the figure of a boy about four feet high bloyvirig a horn, i and is fixed. to a block of s,ione on a small island of gravel washed up from the bed of the river by the force of the water, ivhen the flood hatches at the mill head is drawn, and it, has been there for generations. As to the blasphemous case, there certainly was, a' case of a woman being struck', dead t at town of WiFtsha»f|V|ar jgooa.many yearns ago, who made a statement and called upon God to strike hdr dead if wnat s she said Was not true, and her prayer, was immediately answered. Abd a monument was erected on the spjot, and on a tablet is inscribed the' woman's name and the date and other . details ; and it is there to this day and goes by the name of the Market Cross; and as I happen to hare a picture tif it, I enclose it so that you' will know I am not saying what is not true. I intend to post tho Herald containing the paragraph to the editor of the Warminster and Wesbury Journal, and as a counterbalance I can tell them that wo have some' wonderful potatoes that wi^ produce 13cwt of tubers from lib of seed, and that ten hens here will give as good results as a cow ; and if that does not test their credulity, then I do not know what will. — I am, etc., WILTSHIRE. Fitzroy, November 7th, 1907. [The paragraph referred tq was taken from an exchange. — Ed.]