David Poindexter's Disappearance

Among the records of the English state trials are to be found many
strange stories, which would, as the phrase is, make the fortune of a
modern novelist. But there are also numerous cases, not less
stimulating to imagination and curiosity, which never attained more
than local notoriety, of which the law was able to take but
comparatively small cognizance, although they became subjects of much
unofficial discussion and mystification. Among these cases none,
perhaps, is better worth recalling than that of David Poindexter. It
will be my aim here to tell the tale as simply and briefly as possible
--to repeat it, indeed, very much as it came to my ears while living,
several years ago, near the scene in which its events took place. There
is a temptation to amplify it, and to give it a more recent date and a
different setting; but (other considerations aside) the story might
lose in force and weight more than it would thereby gain in artistic
balance and smoothness.

David Poindexter was a younger son of an old and respected family in
Sussex, England. He was born in London in 1785. He was educated at
Oxford, with a view to his entering the clerical profession, and in the
year 1810 he obtained a living in the little town of Witton, near
Twickenham, known historically as the home of Sir John Suckling. The
Poindexters had been much impoverished by the excesses of David's
father and grandfather, and David seems to have had few or no resources
beyond the very modest stipend appertaining to his position. He was, at
all events, poor, though possessed of capacities which bade fair to
open to him some of the higher prizes of his calling; but, on the other
hand, there is evidence that he chafed at his poverty, and reason to
believe that he had inherited no small share of the ill-regulated
temperament which had proved so detrimental to the elder generations of
his family.

Personally he was a man of striking aspect, having long, dark hair,
heavily-marked eyebrows, and blue eyes; his mouth and chin were
graceful in contour, but wanting in resolution; his figure was tall,
well knit, and slender. He was an eloquent preacher, and capable, when
warmed by his subject, of powerfully affecting the emotions of his
congregation. He was a great favorite with women--whom, however, he
uniformly treated with coldness--and by no means unpopular with men,
toward some of whom he manifested much less reserve. Nevertheless,
before the close of the second year of his incumbency he was known to
be paying his addresses to a young lady of the neighborhood, Miss Edith
Saltine, the only child of an ex-army officer. The colonel was a
widower, and in poor health, and since he was living mainly on his
half-pay, and had very little to give