Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/429

Charles Dickens] flags. The tardy Puritan cannon, too slow to climb the ascent, were also taken—four brass guns (two of them twelve-pounders), one iron saker, shot and powder in quantities, besides heaps of pikes, swords, muskets, pistols, and carbines. Ruthen fled to Saltash, whence he was soon driven, with the loss of eighty men and all his colours. After this battle, Hopton rested at Liskeard, established quarters there, and celebrated a solemn thanksgiving. Charles the First also came there twice; once in 1644, and once in 1645. In 1620 Liskeard was represented by Sir Edward Coke, who is always chained to Littleton in legal memories. In 1775 Edward Gibbon, the historian, was returned for Liskeard, and the next year produced the first volume of his great work, the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Two learned men Liskeard boasts of having educated at its grammar school—two learned but two very different men—Dr. Wolcot and Dean Prideaux. Dr. Wolcot, the son of a Devonshire doctor, first apprenticed to a Cornish apothecary, then a clergyman in Jamaica, practised medicine at Truro and Exeter, and became satirist and tormentor of old King George in London. He nobly threw up the pension with which government silenced him, when he found he had to write for the administration he despised. He was buried at St. Paul's, Covent Garden, his coffin, at his special request, being placed touching that of Butler—Hudibras Butler. Prideaux was a Padstow man; his comprehensive work, The Connexion between the Old and New Testament, is not yet entirely obsolete. He was a learned and virtuous man, who would have been made a bishop, but, suffering from chronic illness, resigned the duty which he could not perform, and made his library his home.

The crow has not far to fly from Liskeard to St. Keyne's Well on the road to West Looe. This saint, unappreciated (except through Southey) out of her own parish, was the daughter of Braganus, a Brecknockshire prince, and came to Cornwall, on a pilgrimage to St. Michael's Mount with her nephew St. Cadoc, who followed to persuade her to return. Being thirsty as they got near Liskeard, St. Cadoc stuck his enchanted staff in the earth, and there instantly gushed out a pure limpid spring which still flows in that green lane near St. Keyne's church. The well is walled in, and from the earth over it grow five trees—an oak, a noble elm, and three ash—which were planted about 1742, by one of the Rashleighs. St. Keyne endowed the water of the spring with a miraculous property. Whichever could first drink of it, after marriage, whether husband or wife, became henceforth the master. Southey, partly following Carew's earlier lines, wrote a pleasant ballad on the subject. The closing verse is full of very quiet humour:

Local historians tell the story differently. There were two sisters, they say, daughters of a Liskeard farmer, who were married, at an interval of several years apart. The first, Jane, a gentle girl, refused her sister's help to outwit her bridegroom, and she and her lover good-naturedly agreed that neither should visit the dangerous well. Mary, the older and more stubborn girl, promised the widower who married her not to run off to the well the moment the last "Amen" was uttered, as he said it would make him appear foolish to the neighbours; but just before the dinner on the wedding day, the bride called the man apart and said, "Dear Robert, now we are alone I may drink;" then, pulling out a bottle, she tossed off the magic water.

Close to Liskeard is St. Neot's, and the crow stays a moment to look in at the church window and record another legend of an eccentric Cornish saint. St. Neot was, according to some historians, the uncle of King Alfred, according to others, a poor shepherd, whose first successful miracle was the impounding in a ring of stones, still shown on Gonzion Down, and uncommonly resembling an old fort, a flock of contumacious crows that had made forays upon his wheat field. Following up this first success, St. Neot went to Rome, returned, became a hermit, and eventually getting tired of solitude, founded a monastery, to make other people suffer what he had already suffered himself. In a well near the monastery, his guardian angel placed two fish, which were never to diminish as long as the saint took out only one daily for his frugal dinner. The saint, however, soon fell ill, and growing dainty and tetchy in his appetite, his servant Barius, in his over zeal to tempt his master to eat, one day scooped up both the fish, and nolens volens, boiled one and fried the other. The saint, aghast at the sin of Barius, instantly fell on his knees to appease heaven till the cooked fish could be thrown back into the spring. The servant was forgiven; the moment the fish touched the water it began to sport and leap, and the saint falling to at his permitted meal was instantly restored to health. At another time St. Neot was praying near the well, in which he used daily to chant the whole Psalter with the water up to his chin, when a hunted deer came and cowered by his side for protection; the dogs on their arrival, reproved by the saint, crouched at his feet, and the astonished huntsman on seeing these miracles renounced the world, and hung his bugle horn up in the cloister as a votive offering. On another occasion some wild deer came of their own accord from the forest to replace some oxen which had been stolen from the saint. The thieves, seeing St. Neot ploughing with the deer, were so conscience stricken that they at once returned the cattle. There is also no doubt that St. Neot built this church mysteriously by night, and that magical teams of two deer and one hare drew all the stone used in its building. St. Neot was a little man, and they say that he had two ways of opening the church door—one by throwing up the key into the keyhole, another by bidding the lock descend to him.