gain
credit if it be true.' The caution of this commendation is delightful.
More, alas! we do not learn, for the writer forbears 'to speak of his
cow (which being killed, chopped in pieces, and boiling in the kettle,
came out whole and sound at his call), his staff, his oak, and his man
Abel, which would seem wonders. Yet all these you may see at large,
lively represented to you in a fair glass window.' It is very
disappointing that the window filled with the further wonders, the very
names of which have a charm, should have perished.

St Brannock Church is large, and, like Morte Church, is partly
Perpendicular and partly Early English. It has an unusually wide
panelled roof, and on one of the panels is carved a sow and some little
pigs--an illustration of a legend connecting the saint with the church,
for the tradition ran that he had been told in a dream to build his
church 'wherever he should first meet a sow and her family.' A similar
group is to be seen in the porch of the church at Newton St Cyres. Some
of the bench-ends in St Brannock's Church are very beautifully carved.

The road to Barnstaple, bending to the south-east, follows the estuary
of the Taw for nearly six miles.

The town is very prettily placed, but it is dominated by modern
buildings, and has not the air of antiquity with which its history might
have invested it. The river sweeps round a bend of a green and pleasant
valley just above the town, and along the strand is a walk shaded with
trees, looking over the river to a pastoral country beyond. Nearer the
bridge is Queen Anne's Walk, 'an open portico near the river, called the
Quay Walk, being an exchange of the merchants, etc.,' renamed when it
was rebuilt in Queen Anne's reign. From the bridge westward the scene
has an air of peaceful contentedness. Sea-gulls flutter among the
sand-banks, from which 'the sea retires itself' at low-tide, leaving
only a small, shining stream, which seems 'to creep between shelves and
sands.' Beyond are green marshes, and gentle rounded hills behind them
lead on one from another. The country is much the same all along the
river to the sea.

Bideford is proud of its bridge, which is very high, and has sixteen
arches. Several people have been given the credit of building it, and
its date is supposed to be some time during the thirteenth century.

The church, dedicated to St Peter and St Paul, is cross-shaped, and the
lead steeple looks well against the sky, espec