The Exeter and Plymouth Gazette of 27th November 1847 published this little cautionary tale:
"CAUTION. - A few days since, the servant of a respectable family in this city, being in North-street with her master's children, went into a shop to make a trifling purchase, which did not detain her many seconds. A little one, four years of age, was left at the door, when, it appears, a woman enticed her away with an apple, enveloping her in her cloak, at the same time promising to take her to her papa's house, which the frightened girl implored her to do.
On coming out of the shop, the eldest girl missing her sister, in indescribable distress, not knowing in what quarter to direct her search, ran up the street, crossed the Fore-street, and with the speed of terror soon reached Combe-street, where she detected, from beneath a woman's cloak the dress of her little sister. She immediately insisted on the child being given up; but too much occupied with the joy of the recovery, no attention was paid to the woman, who, it is supposed, fearful of detection, ran off towards the low haunts of Westgate."
This tale reads to me like it comes from Charles Dickens' notebooks (he was writing Dombey and Son at the time}: the mysterious woman from the low haunts ominously cloaked who has brought a ,rosy surely, apple into the city and found the child 'of a respectable family' and whisked her away, the feisty elder sister running blind across the busy Fore-street and then, in distant Combe-street, miraculously recognising the hem of her sister's dress and rescuing the 'little one', the boundless 'joy of the recovery, why! -, all that's enough drama for a chapter or two.
I do enjoy stories with happy endings.
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