Page:A book of the west; being an introduction to Devon and Cornwall.djvu/415

Rh steam was condensed by sending a current of cold water on the outside of the cylinder, an arrangement that required a boy to be always at hand with a bucket of water. Watt's improvement of employing steam to drive down the piston was invented whilst he was repairing one of Newcomen's engines. Newcomen was baptised at Dartmouth in 1663; he died in 1729. His house was removed in 1864, but some of the old carved oak has been utilised in Newcomen Cottage, Townstal, as well as the "clovel" or wooden lintel over the fireplace at which Newcomen sat watching the steam puffing from his mother's kettle, and first conceived the idea of employing steam as a force for propelling engines. A chimney-piece of plaster, representing Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego before Nebuchadnezzar, is at Brook-hill House, on the Kingswear side of the river. This same handsome chimney-piece, of oak, came from Greenway, up the Dart, where lived Sir Walter Raleigh, and it is said that it was before the fire kindled under this chimney-piece that the great navigator indulged in the first pipe of tobacco he ever smoked in England. There is a story told of Sir Walter being called in with his pipe for a very novel purpose at Littleham. There lived there a gentleman of Dutch or German extraction, named Creveldt, who had been at deadly feud with a neighbour, Sir Roger de Wheelingham, and the latter died without any reconciliation. Thenceforth, Creveldt was tormented from sunset to sunrise by the ghost of his enemy. He could not rest; he could not eat, and, worst of all, he could not drink. The days for