“Here in this Chancell do I ly
Known by the name of John Treffry
Being made & born for to dye
So must thou friend as well as I
Therefore Good works be Sure to try
But chiefly love and charity
And still on them with faith rely
So be happy eternally.”
This epitaph to Mary Courtney is not without a certain sweetness of conceit:—
“In Memory of Mary ye daughter
of Sir Peter Courtney of Trethurffe:
who dyed the 14th day of June, in
the year of our Lord
1655.
Neer this a rare Jewell’s Sa’t,
Clos’d uppe in a cabinet:
Let no sacrilegious hand
Breake through: ’tis ye Strickt Com̄aund
of the Jeweller: who hath Sayd
(And ’tis fit he be obayd)
He require it Safe, and Sound,
Both aboue and under Ground:
This Mary was Grandafter to Jonathan
Raishleighe of Menebilly Esqr.”
Choir practice ended, the church was closed, and we were cast forth upon the streets with the tail end of the evening before us. Fowey is a seaside town, singular in having no sands and no recognised public promenade; there was nothing to do then but to spend the evening at our hotel over our maps and notes. We had by this time collected an intolerable quantity of the tourists’ usual lumber. Fossils, lumps of tin and copper ore, and fragments of granite would drop from our knapsacks upon the least provocation, or upon no provocation whatever. We amalgamated our hoards, threw away a goodly percentage, and sent the remainder of the relics up to London.
I don’t like to think about the cost of their carriage. It was, like the relics, collectively, and in detail, heavy. Of what use are the things after all? You shall hear.
At this moment of writing up the journal of our tour it is Christmas time, and waits are lingering in the street below me, howling dismally. I have noiselessly opened the window, and thrown an ammonite at them from the vantage-point of the second floor. It is to be hoped that one or other of them was as much struck by it as I was (but in a different sense) when I found it in Cornwall. But that ammonite was as large as a saucer, and, considering that costly freight from the west, somewhat expensive ammunition. Coals would have been cheaper, less compromising, and quite as effective. I say less compromising, because, if any one is severely hurt, ammonites are not so common in London but what their possession might readily be traced.
But, sooth to say, they, with the tin ore and the lumps of granite, have become almost expended by now, and generally for the prompt dispersal of the nomadic cats, in full voice, who haunt the areas of our street.
These spoils of our touring were handier after all than coals, which blacken the hands, or soap, for which the morning finds a use; but I sometimes wonder who finds them, the very aristocracy of missiles, hurtled through midnight air from lofty eyrie upon pavements deserted by all save the slow-pacing policeman and those aforementioned disturbers of the peace.