The Fisherman’s Daughter Who Kidnapped a Preacher

Early last fall there died in Troy an old man and his wife. For five years, the dead man had been minister of the Independent chapel. A young successor, fresh from his theological training, arrived to take the pulpit. He was twenty-one, anxious, and deeply impressed by the little coastal port where he found lodging. The town was divided by a harbor: the prosperous Troy, and the poorer, fishing village of Kuan across the water. On his first night in the parsonage, while gazing out at the harbor, a young woman appeared in the moonlight at the garden quay. Her name was Nance Trewartha, and she told the preacher that a parishioner was dying across the water and needed his comfort immediately. He joined her in her father's fishing boat. Once away from the shore, she revealed the truth: there was no dying woman. She had concocted the story because she had fallen in love with him, and knew that as a fisherman's daughter, she was considered beneath him in rank. She sailed the boat toward Plymouth, refusing to return until he promised to marry her, telling him she was 'perishing of love.' Caught in her conviction and the moonlight, the young minister eventually gave in to her demand. Three months later, they were married. Though it scandalized his congregation, he kept his pulpit, and it was said she wiped away the initial deception with fifty years of honest affection.