“No, thank you, sir.”

“Are you quite certain? It is scarcely any trouble and if the Church has any attraction for you … ?”

“I promise you, sir, it has none.”

“Your good taste as ever does you credit. A mitre is a wretchedly uncomfortable sort of thing to wear and not at all becoming.”

Poor Stephen was assailed by miracles. Every few days something would occur to profit him in some way. Sometimes the actual value of what he gained was unremarkable – perhaps no more than a few shillings – but the means by which it came to him were always extraordinary. Once, for example, he received a visit from the overseer of a farm who insisted that, some years before, he had met Stephen at a cockfight near Richmond in the North Riding of Yorkshire and that Stephen had wagered him that the Prince of Wales would one day do something to bring disgrace upon the country. As this had now happened (the overseer cited the Prince’s desertion of his wife as the shameful deed) the overseer had come to London by the stagecoach to bring Stephen twenty-seven shillings and sixpence – which, he said, was the amount of the wager. It was useless for Stephen to insist that he had never been to a cockfight or to Richmond in Yorkshire; the overseer would not be content until Stephen had taken the money.

A few days after the overseer’s visit a large grey dog was discovered standing in the road opposite the house in Harley-street. The poor creature was drenched by the rain and splattered with mud and bore every sign of having travelled a great distance. More curious still, it had a document grasped between its jaws. The footmen, Robert and Geoffrey, and John Longridge, the cook, did their best to get rid of it by shouting and hurling bottles and stones at it, but the dog bore this treatment philosophically and declined to move until Stephen Black had come out in the rain and taken the document from its mouth. Then it went away with a quietly contented air, as if congratulating itself upon a difficult task well done. The document proved to be a map of a village in Derbyshire and shewed, among other surprizing things, a secret door let into the side of a hill.

Another time Stephen received a letter from the mayor and aldermen of Bath describing how, two months before, the Marquess of Wellesley had been in Bath and had done nothing during his stay but talk of Stephen Black and his remarkable honesty, intelligence and faithfulness to his master. So impressed had the mayor and the aldermen been by his lordship’s report, that they had immediately ordered a medal, celebrating Stephen’s life and virtues, to be struck. When five hundred medals had been made, the mayor and the aldermen had ordered them to be distributed to the chief householders of Bath amid general rejoicing. They enclosed a medal for Stephen, and begged that whenever he next found himself in Bath he would make himself known to them so that they might hold a magnificent dinner in his honour.