Page:Devonshire Characters and Strange Events.djvu/830

This page has been validated.

706

DEVONSHIRE CHARACTERS

was to cut a groove on the surface of the rock, fill that with quicklime, and then throw on water. The swelling of the lime rent the rock.

The old works in Chaw Gully were taken in hand by Captain Palk, who deepened and successfully worked a shaft there. A good deal of money was made, but "the eyes of the mine were picked out," and it is now, like nearly all the Dartmoor mines, a "knacked bal," a picture of desolation, and the ravens now build in the chasm, on a ledge of the rock.

Palk was intimate with Jonas Coaker, the "Poet of the Moor," as he styled himself. His poetry was, however, only rhyme, and that often bad.

"What's the difference between poetry and blank verse?" asked one miner of another.

"Why, the difference be this," was the reply. "Ef you say,

He went up to the mill-dam And failed down slam,

that, I reckon, be poetry. But ef you say instead,

He went up to the mill-dam And failed down wop,

that's blank verse. Knaw now, do 'ee?"

This was Jonas Coaker's conception of poetry. He was born at Hartland, Post Bridge, on 23 February, 1801, as he sang:—

I drew my breath first on this moor;    There my forefathers dwell'd. Its hills and dales I've traversed o'er,    Its desert parts beheld.

As a young man he worked on the Moor building new-take walls, and he esteemed himself almost as highly in this capacity as in knocking out verse. Later