It was to his reputation as an advising barrister, and perhaps a little to the kindness of heart that must have been familiar to all who knew him, that Fielding owed his connection with that extraordinary popular excitement of 1753, the mysterious case of the servant girl Elizabeth Canning. On the 29th of January 'Betty Canning' presented herself, after a month's disappearance, at the door of her mother's house in London, in a deplorable state of weakness and distress, and declared that she had been kidnapped by two men on New Year's night, taken to a house on the Hertford road, and there confined by an old gipsy woman for twenty-eight days, in a hay loft, with a pitcher of water and a few pieces of bread for sole sustenance. On the twenty ninth day, according to her own account, she escaped through a window and made her way back to her home. Her neighbours, fired with pity for her sufferings, subscribed means for a prosecution; and, says Fielding, in the pamphlet which he published two months after these events, "Mr. _Salt_, the Attorney who hath been employed in this Cause, ... upon this Occasion, as he hath done upon many others, ... fixed upon me as the Council to be advised with." Then we have the following little domestic sketch, the only picture left to us of Henry Fielding as a practising barrister: "Accordingly, upon the _6th of February_, as I was sitting in my Room, Counsellor _Maden_ being then with me, my Clerk delivered me a Case, which was thus, as I remember, indorsed at the Top, The Case of Elizabeth Canning _for_ Mr Fielding's _opinion_, and at the Bottom, _Salt_, Solr. Upon the Receipt of this Case, with my Fee, I bid my Clerk give my Service to Mr. _Salt_ and tell him, that I would take the Case with me into the Country, whither I intended to go the next Day, and desired he would call for it the _Friday_ Morning afterwards; after which, without looking into it, I delivered it to my Wife, who was then drinking Tea with us, and who laid it by."