brated birds, the choughs, black, with scarlet beaks and legs, said to be reincarnations of the Arthurian soul; only four of these birds have ever been known to exist at one time, and they are said to be found nowhere in the world except at Tintagel.

Of course fairy tales and superstition go hand in hand. A certain clergyman in Cornwall once received the following letter: "Rev. Sir: I should take it as a great favour if your honour would be good enough to let me have the key of the church-yard to-night, to go in at twelve o'clock to cut off three bits of lead about the size of half a farthing each from three different spouts, for the cure of fits."

In connection with Tavistock I find an interesting item in the Church Wardens' accounts, "29 April, 1660: collected for a company going to New England taken by the Ostenders, 6s 6d." This is a casual mention of some of our own early settlers, who often came on Dutch ships, as we know.

CHAPTER VII

LONDON NOTES

N these days, when every one has described all the chief sights of London, I am not going to waste your time with an itinerary of the city.

I suppose one nearly always goes straight to Westminster Abbey, as did the writer of a certain diary in 1437, who speaks of: "going about London town and seeing the sights, and yesterday were at mass in the Abbey Church at Westminster, which is a right fair town very nigh unto London." I recall the first visit of the Little One to Westminster Abbey. She evinced pardonable family pride in the statue of Joseph Addison, and when her father told her

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Shakespeare's is just opposite to him," she exclaimed, "Oh, I must see Shakespeare's monument! I am devoted to him! He wrote about Ophelia, who got nervous and died!" In a moment she started, and said, "There is a sign that says 'Don't touch the monuments!' and yet here I am standing on the tomb of Alfred Tennyson!"

While we of a later generation regret above everything the vast destruction caused by the great fire of London, this was not regarded as an unmixed misfortune in the eighteenth century. Defoe speaks of the fire as "furnishing the most perfect occasion that can ever happen in any city to rebuild it with pomp and regularity!" In visiting the furtively situated church of St. Bartholomew the Great, in Smithfield, one passes houses that have been standing for centuries, having survived this very great fire. There is no outside to St. Bartholomew the Great, any more than an oyster overgrown by other shells can be said to have an outside which is properly its own! But it has one of the finest interiors in all the world. The heavy Norman, over-conscientious pillars with their numerous high stilted arches enclosed by the apsidal ambulatory, all are expressive of great age. The old polished wooden effigy of the founder, Rahere, the fusty dull white glass in Prior Bolton's pew, are only to be equalled by the delightful triforium gallery filled with broken sculpture and the romance of centuries. A charge of sixpence is made for an ascent to the triforium, for which sum we cheerfully encountered this peril.

To turn again to the founder's tomb, we see