Page:Devonshire Characters and Strange Events.djvu/535

Rh was succeeded as master in the Ashburton Grammar School by another man not much older and still less qualified for the station than himself. Thus at once crumbled to nothing all his castles in the air that he had built; and still the only light in his darkness continued to be the smile and welcome from the girl a few doors off.

There is a ballad, "The Little Girl Down the Lane," sung to a plaintive, sweet air, greatly affected at one time by apprentices, and not yet forgotten in Devonshire; it relates the loves and sorrows of a 'prentice boy, bound by his articles to a tailor, who loved a maiden in the same lane, and who induced her to marry him. But, alas! as the couple were in church and the knot was about to be tied, the master tailor got wind of it, rushed in, stopped the ceremony, and carried off the bridegroom to his bench again. The words are mere doggerel, but they would appeal to Gifford, as they have appealed to many a Devonshire apprentice, and often in his garret he may have hummed over the pathetic air as he thought of the kind young face that alone in Exeter had smiled on him.

The darkest hour precedes the dawn. And now, when he was in the profoundest depths of depression, help arrived, and that from an unexpected quarter. Mr. William Cookesley, a surgeon of Ashburton, a large-hearted and open-handed man, having by accident heard some of his verses, recalled the unfortunate boy, thrust from pillar to post, and inquired after him. His history was well known to all in Ashburton, and he at once interested himself in Gifford, and not only gave from his own scantily furnished purse, but begged help from his friends and patients to cancel Gifford's apprenticeship and further his education. On examining his