[To the Editor of TOE SeErr_1roa.]
submit a possible solution of the problem suggested by your quotation last week, from Mr. Kellett's reminiscences, about an old lady who, speaking in 1884, of Oliver Cromwell, said: " My dear husband's first wife's first husband knew him well and liked him much." Here is my contribution to the calculation involved : Husband 1 was born in 1651, and therefore had time to know and like Cromwell before the latter's death in 1638. When husband 1 was 76 lie married, in 1727, wife 1, who was then 16, having been born in 1711. After the death of husband 1,. his widow,- then 40 years of age, in the year 1751,
married a young man 15 years her junior, who had been born in 1726 (whom I will call Husband 2). They lived together for over thirty years ; when husband 2 was a widower, 74 years of age, in 18(X), he married a girl of 15, whose birth was in 1785. By 1884 this girl had become an old lady of 99 ; and being able to talk was heard to say that her husband's first wife's first husband had known and liked Oliver Cromwell.
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