Henry Fauntleroy was only thirty-nine years of age when he met the doom then meted out to forgers. As partner in the banking firm of Marsh, Sibbald & Co., of Berners Street, he had entire control of the firm's Stock Exchange business, and, unknown to his partners, had for nine years pursued a consistent course of illegally selling the securities belonging to customers--forging their signatures to transfers. Paying the interest and dividends as usual, the frauds, amounting in all to £70,000, might have remained undiscovered for many years longer; but the credit of the bank, long in a tottering condition, was exhausted in September, 1824, when all was disclosed. Fauntleroy was arrested on the 11th, and on the 14th the bank suspended payment. [Illustration: PEASE POTTAGE.] The failure of the bank was largely due to the extravagance of the partners, Fauntleroy himself living in fine style as a country gentleman; but the scandalous stories current at the time as to his mode of life were quite disproved, while the partners were clearly shown to have been entirely ignorant of the state of their affairs, which acquits them of complicity, though it does not redound to their credit as business men. Fauntleroy readily admitted his guilt, and added that he acted thus to prop up the long-standing instability of the firm. He was tried at the Old Bailey October 30th, 1824, sentenced to death, and executed November 30th, in the presence of a crowd of 200,000 persons. He was famed among connoisseurs for the excellence of his claret, and would never disclose its place of origin. Friends who visited him in the condemned cell begged him to confide in them, but he would never do so, and when he died the secret died with him. No one has ever claimed acquaintance with the ghost of Fauntleroy, with or without his rope; but the road to Hand Cross has long enjoyed--or been afflicted with--the reputation of being haunted. The Hand Cross ghost is, by all accounts, an extremely eccentric, but harmless spook, with peculiar notions in the matter of clothes, and given, when the turnpike-gate stood here, to monkey-tricks with bolts and bars, whereby pikemen were not only scared, but were losers of sundry tolls. Evidently that sprite was the wayfarers' friend. "Squire Powlett" is another famous phantom of this forest-side, and is more terrifying, being headless, and given to the hateful practice of springing up behind the horseman who ventures this way when night has fallen upon the glades, riding with him to the forest boundary. Motorists and cyclists, however, do not seem to have been troubled. Possibly they have a turn of speed quite beyond the powers of such an old-fashioned spook.