The New Hampshire Gazette And Historical Chronicle

The following is an Account of a very extraordinary PERSONAGE.

Near Nanfelin, in Denbighshire, lives Jane Morgan, whose memory yet serves her to give an account of several things she hath seen 30 years ago. She walks upright without a stick, her teeth are almost perfect, and she can see well without spectacles, but her organs of smelling are so corroborated by age, that no stench can invade them the least prejudice. She has been reduced to the most unheard of shifts for food, and by the keenness of her stomach she may be thought now to be in the meridian of her age, for of whatsoever disease cattle, horses, &c. die, she will eat them and all carrion, in whatever state she finds it, are alike to her stomach: If any will bestow corn upon her, she will carry two bushels to the mill, which is nothing to what she has done formerly. Some people of ninety say, their fathers have told them she was a very tall woman; and in a house out of which she had seen buried 11 heirs, her height was taken above 100 years ago, but last year coming to the same place, she was found to want near 18 inches of that measure, and is now only four feet four inches. She is as merry as a girl of fifteen, and will sing from morning to night, &c. N. B. She was married forty five years before she had any children, and in her 66th year had a daughter; and says her mother was six feet high, and before she died shrunk to three feet six inches.

What sort of menstruum has her stomach, since no stench offends her?

How comes the whole contexture of her body, with such consent of parts, to be diminished?

And, since the bones must be contracted; how come we to find bones long buried, of the same length as when first interred?