Not long afterwards came the news that the farmer Gibberty had died suddenly in the night, and with it was wafted the rumour of foul play. There was an old custom in that part of the country that whenever there was a death in the house all the inmates should march in procession past the corpse. It was really a sort of primitive inquest, for it was believed that in the case of foul play the corpse would bleed at the nose as the murderer passed it. This custom, said Diggory, was universally observed in that part of the country, even in cases as free from all suspicion as those of women dying in child-bed. And in all the taverns and farm-houses of the neighbourhood it was being whispered that the corpse of the farmer Gibberty, on the defendant's walking past it, had bled copiously, and when Christopher Pugwalker's turn had come to pass it, it had bled a second time. And knowing what he did, Diggory Carp came to feel that it was his duty to lodge an accusation against the widow. His two reasons, then, for thinking her guilty were that the corpse had bled when she passed it, and that she had bought from his daughter osiers the sap of which was poisonous. The motive for the crime he found in her having a young lover, whom she wished should stand in her dead husband's shoes. It was useless for the defendant to deny that Pugwalker was her lover--the fact had for months been the scandal of the neighbourhood, and she had finally lost all sense of shame and had actually had him to lodge in the farm for several months before her husband's death. This was proved beyond a shadow of a doubt by the witnesses summoned by Diggory. As for the bleeding of the corpse: vulgar superstitions did not fall within the cognizance of the Law, and the widow ignored it in her defence. However, with regard to that other vulgar superstition to which the plaintiff had alluded, fairy fruit, she admitted, in passing, that very much against her wishes her late husband had sometimes used it as manure--though she had never discovered how he procured it. As to the osiers--she allowed that she had bought a bundle from the plaintiff's daughter; but that it was for no sinister purpose she was able conclusively to prove. For she summoned various witnesses--among others the midwife from the village, who was always called in in cases of sickness--who had been present during the last hours of the farmer, and who all of them swore that his death had been a painless one. And various physicians, who were summoned as expert witnesses, all maintained that the victim of the poisonous sap of osiers always died in agony. Then she turned the tables on the plaintiff. She proved that Diggory's dismissal had been neither sudden nor unjust; for, owing to his thieving propensities, he had often been threatened with it by her late husband, and several of the farm-servants testified to the truth of her words.