Page:An Old English Home and Its Dependencies.djvu/117

Rh and gilt. I at once made a careful working drawing of it to scale. Years passed away, and not till 1882 did I revisit the church—when, judge my distress. It had been put into the hands of an architect to "restore," and he had restored the pulpit out of existence, and replaced it by the thing represented on the next page. I at once asked the rector what had become of the old pulpit, which, by the way, had been hewn out of the trunk of an enormous oak tree. He replied that he knew nothing about it—except that he thought some scraps of the carving were in the National School. I then went to the school-house and questioned the master about it. He said that he believed there was some old carving in a cupboard—and there we found it, with dusters, old reading books, a dirty sponge, and any amount of cobwebs and filth. The rector kindly allowed me to carry away the scraps, and with them and my working drawing taken thirty-one years before we found that it was possible to reconstruct the old pulpit, and now—thanks to my cousin, who has illustrated this book, and the zeal of the