In a bid to save the expense of one day's food in his family, John Overs cooked up a plan to pretend he was dead for twenty-four hours, in the vain expectation that his servants would, out of propriety, fast until after his funeral.
Having procured his daughter to consent to this plot, even against her better nature, he was put into a sheet, and stretched out in his chamber, having one taper burning at his head and another at his feet, according to the custom of the time.
However, when his servants heard of his decease, instead of lamenting they celebrated and, danced around his body and raided his larder, helping themselves to a banquet.
The Ferryman bore all this as best he could and as much like a dead man; "but when he could endure it no longer," continues the tract, "stirring and struggling in his sheet, like a ghost with a candle in each hand, he purposed to rise up, and rate 'em for their sauciness and boldness; when one of them thinking that the Devil was about to rise in his likeness, being in a great amaze, catched hold of the butt-end of a broken oar which was in the chamber, and being a sturdy knave, thinking to kill the Devil at the first blow, actually struck out his brains."
At the trial which subsequently ensued, the servant was acquitted, and the ferryman made accessory and cause of his own death. The estate of Overs then fell to his daughter, and her lover hearing of it raced to her from the country; but in a tragic accident his horse stumbled and he broke his neck on the highway.