26 NOVEMBER 1887, Page 3

As for Canon MacColl's letter, published in Wednesday's Times, it

leaves the beanstalk theory not a leg to stand upon. In the first place, no one who saw what Canon Liddon and Canon MacColl saw, ever suggested that it was beanstalks or a scarecrow. That was a theory invented at a distance by a Consul "strongly disposed to reject the practical consequences " which would have flowed from the reality of the impalement. In the next place, Bishop Stroumayer, in whose diocese the impalement must have taken place, had received constant complaints of such matters, and had been informed even of a woman's impale- ment about the same time in the same neighbourhood. In the third place, a report to the English Ambassador in Turkey sub- sequently published,—though for some time suppressed,—had been sent from the very same Consulate from which the bean- stalk theory proceeded, complaining of these impalemente ; and yet the Consul, whose official subordinate had made that com- plaint some six months before, declared that for twenty years he had heard of nothing of the kind. We always held the story to be perfectly true, but now all England will know it to be perfectly true, and the letters in Friday's Times,—tbo writer of one of which does not know the difference between the Danube and the Save,—will not alter men's opinion.