Page:An Old English Home and Its Dependencies.djvu/114

100 screen. An incumbent gave up this church to a restorer. He cut down the screen, took the tracery of the screen-windows, sawed it in half, turned it upside down, and employed it to glue on to some wretched deal bench-ends, and to a breastwork screen to the chancel, and to ornament a deal door. At Sheepstor was a gorgeous screen, rich with gold and colour. I remember it well. The church was delivered over to a local builder to be made neat, and cheaply—above all, cheaply. He destroyed the entire screen, and left the church a horror to behold. Now the present rector has recovered a few poor fragments of the screen and has stuck them up, attached to a pillar with a box beneath, pleading for subscriptions for the reconstruction of what was wantonly destroyed fourteen years ago. In the year 1851, when I was a boy of seventeen, I went a walking tour in Devonshire, and halted one day at Kenton to see the church. I found in it not only one of the finest screens in the county, but also the very finest carved oak pulpit, richly coloured