Upon the last Saturday of November 1687, the elder Standsfield travelled from Edinburgh to New Mills in company with Mr. John Bell, minister of the Gospel, who was to officiate the next day in Morham Church (Morham is a secluded parish on the lower slope of the Lammermoors, some three miles south-west of New Mills; the church plays an important part in what follows). Arrived at New Mills the pair supped together, thereafter the host accompanied his guest to his chamber, where he sat talking “pertinently and to good purpose” till about ten o’clock. Left alone, our divine gat him to bed, but had scarce fallen asleep when he awoke in terror, for a terrible cry rang through the silence of the winter night. A confused murmur of voices and a noise of folk moving about succeeded. Mr. Bell incontinently set all down to “evil wicked spirits,” so having seen to the bolts of his chamber door, and having fortified his timid soul with prayers, he huddled in bed again; but the voices and noises continuing outside the house he crept to the window, where peering out he perceived nought in the darkness. The noises died away across the garden towards the river, and Bell lay quaking till the morning. An hour after day Philip came to his chamber to ask if his father had been there, for he had been seeking him upon the banks of the water. “Why on the banks of that water?” queried Bell in natural amazement. Without answer Philip hurriedly left the room. Later that same Sunday morning a certain John Topping coming from Monkrig to New Mills, along the bank of the Tyne, saw a man’s body floating on the water. Philip, drawn to the spot by some terrible fascination, was looking on (you picture his face). “Whose body was it?” asked the horror-struck Topping, but Philip replied not. Well _he_ knew it was his father’s corpse. It was noted that, though a hard frosty morning, the bank was “all beaten to mash with feet and the ground very open and mellow.” The dead man being presently dragged forth and carried home was refused entry by Philip into the house so late his own, “for he had not died like a man but like a beast,”--the suggestion being that his father had drowned himself,--and so the poor remains must rest in the woollen mill, and then in a cellar “where there was very little light.” The gossips retailed unseemly fragments of scandal, as “within an hour after his father’s body was brought from the water, he got the buckles from his father’s shoes and put them in his;” and again, there is note of a hideous and sordid quarrel between Lady Standsfield and Janet Johnstoun, “who was his own concubine,” so the prosecution averred, “about some remains of the Holland of the woonding-sheet,” with some incriminating words of Philip that accompanied.