Page:Early Reminiscences.djvu/300

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246 EARLY REMINISCENCES Wood of London, undoubtedly of the family of Wood of Orchard in the parish. The date of the carving was 1523-4. The east window of the chancel, contrary to what is usual in Devonshire and Cornish churches, consisted of two lights high up in the wall. Beneath there may have been a richly carved reredos, but of this nothing remained. The old pulpit had been Jacobean but of no value in design or execution. I was one day going up by the coach from Lew Down to Exeter, on my way to Cambridge. The driver was named Rattenbury. I had secured a box-seat. At Okehampton a heavy, coarse-looking man with an inflamed face mounted to the seat behind me, and at once fell into conversation with the other travellers on the same bench. His conversation, however, was very much one-sided, and consisted in boasts as to his own great merits. He was a butcher in the parish of S. Sidwell; he informed us all that he was very liberal towards his poor customers, always giving them over-weight, or else systematically undercharging them for what they did receive. He was an exemplary husband and an indulgent father. Rattenbury looked out of the corner of his eyes at me. There was a twinkle in them, and a humorous twitch of his lips. When we arrived in Exeter, and dismounted at the London Inn, he said to me: " You heard what that fellow said about himself ? Well, there is not a worse scoundrel in all Exeter than he. He has been had up thrice before the Bench for using false weights. He turned his poor wife into the street one winter night, and he beats and but half-clothes his wretched children." Since then I have never forgotten the lesson taught me as to the liability every one has to overestimate himself, in fact to view oneself in a totally false light, and how necessary it is for every one to know himself as he really is. The old belief was that every man had his second self, a Doppelgdnger, as the Germans called this mysterious adjunct to man. But in fact every man had got his Three Selves : the first is the idealized Self as he contemplates his own capabilities and gifts and merits. And many an one sees this Self as the spectre of the Brocken, exaggerated to a hundred-fold his real size. The second Self is the man as seen by his Maker, and few there be that get a glimpse of that, and that is precisely what in the