Page:Devonshire Characters and Strange Events.djvu/739

Rh the attention of all parochial officers. According to him the wages of the Devonshire peasant were, without food, about five shillings a week."

Richard died s.p.

John Dunning, brother of the pamphleteer, lived with Mary, his wife, at Guatham. After eleven years of married life he died in 1706, leaving four sons and three daughters. The second of their sons who attained manhood was born in 1701, and bore his father's name of John. He was bred to the law, and having married Agnes, daughter of Henry Jutsham, of Old-a-Port, in Modbury, settled down as an attorney at Ashburton, probably drawn there by the representations of his uncle Edward Gould. He settled into a house at Gulwell, in the parish of Staverton, a stone's-throw from the boundary of Ashburton.

This attorney Dunning had a son John born on 18 October, 1731. Attorney Dunning now moved into Ashburton into a house in West Street, where he resided till his death, which took place in 1780. Day by day in his youth did the ugly, ungainly boy John Dunning trudge to the school of Ashburton, occupying the ancient chapel of S. James. This chapel had been decorated with large coats-of-arms in plaster, coloured periodically, of benefactors. Above the master's desk at the east end were the arms of Ashburton. The other coats were Harris, Gould, Blundell, and Young. As the urchin, ugly as an imp from the abyss, sat on his form looking up at the great blue and gold lion of the Goulds—his uncle's coat—did it ever flash across his mind that he might eventually, like the cuckoo, kick them out of their nest and gather all their property into his own hands?

At the early age of thirteen he left school and was taken into the paternal office for five years' service as