A CRADLE ON A ROOF.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 231, 29 September 1928, Page 12 (Supplement)

A CRADLE ON A ROOF.

The story of a baby asleep in a cradlle on the roof of a church, baby and cradle having been placed there without hands, seems like a piece of extravagant fiction, but there is an old church in London, that of All Hallows, Barking, that has such a story connected with it. It happened thac in the last month of the reign of Charles I. a certain ship-chand-ler was foolish enough to busy himself over a barrel of gunpowder with a lighted candle in his hand. He paid the price of his folly. A spark fell it,no the gunpowder, and the place was blown up. The man who did the mischief was not the only one to perish. Fifty houses were wrecked, and the number of people who were killed was not known. In one house among the fifty a mother had nut her baby into its cradle to sleep before the explosion occurred. What became of the mother no one ever learned; but the next morning there was found upon the leads of the church a young child in a cradle, baby and cradle being uninjured by the explosion that had lifted both to such a height.