I, Jeremiah Gibberty, farmer and law-man of the district of Swan-on-the-Dapple, having ever been a merry man who loved his joke, do herein crack my last, this side of the Debatable Hills, in the hopes that it will not lie so long in the damp earth as to prove but a lame rocket when the time comes to fire it off. And this is my last joke, and may all who hear it hold their sides, and may the tears run down their cheeks. I, Jeremiah Gibberty, was wilfully murdered by my second wife, Clementina, daughter of Ralph Baldbreeches, sailor, and an outlandish woman from the far North. In the which crime she was aided by her lover, Christopher Pugwalker, a foreigner who called himself an herbalist. And I know by sundry itchings of my skin which torment me as I write and by my spotted tongue that I have been given what the folks who know them call death-berries. And they were boiled down to look like mulberry jelly, offered to me by my dear wife, and of which I ate in my innocence. And I bid him who finds this writing to search for a little lad, by name Peter Pease, the son of a tipsy tinker. For this little lad, having an empty stomach and being greedy for pence, came to me but an hour ago with a basket full of these same death-berries and asked me if I should like to buy them. And I, to test him, asked him if he thought there was a blight in my orchard that I should be so hard put to it for fruit. And he said he thought we must like them up at Gibberty's for he had seen the gentleman who lived with us (Christopher Pugwalker) but a week since, gathering them. And if Christopher Pugwalker should leave these parts, then let the law search for a dumpy fellow, with nut-brown hair, a pug-nose freckled like a robin's egg, and one eye brown, the other blue. And in order that my last joke may be a well-built one, I have tested the berries I bought from the little lad, though it wrung my heart to do so, on one of the rabbits of a certain little maid, by name, Marjory Beach, the daughter of my carter. And I have done so because she, being seven years old and a healthy lass, runs a good chance of being still this side of the hills when someone digs up this buried jest. And if she be alive she will not have forgotten how one of her rabbits took to scratching itself, and how its tongue was spotted like a snake, and how she found it lying dead. And I humbly beg her pardon for having played such a cruel trick on a little maid, and I ask my heirs (if so be any of them still alive) to send her a fine buck rabbit, a ham, and ten gold pieces. And, though I am law-man and could put them under arrest before I die, yet, for a time, I hold my hand. Partly because I have been a hunter all my life, and as the hare and deer are given their chance to escape, so shall they have