Page:Devonshire Characters and Strange Events.djvu/445

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BENJAMIN KENNICOTT, D.D.
371

Lew, who challenged Ashwater, Broadwood, S. Stephen's, and Callington. I give but the opening verse:—

     One day in October,
     Neither drunken nor sober,
O'er Broadbury Down I was wending my way,
     When I heard of some ringing,
     Some dancing and singing,
I ought to remember that Jubilee Day.
     ’Twas in Ashwater town,
     The bells they did soun';
They rang for a belt and a hat laced with gold.
     But the men of North Lew
     Rang so steady and true,
That never were better in Devon, I hold.

On this song the late Rev. H. H. Sheppard remarked: "There is an indolent easy grace about this tune which is quite in keeping with the words and charmingly suggestive. The sunny valleys, the breezy downs, the sweet bell-music swelling and sinking on the soft autumn air, the old folk creeping out of their chimney-nooks to listen, and all employment in the little town suspended in the popular excitement at the contest for the hat laced with gold; all this, told in a few words and illustrated by a few notes, quite calls up a picture of life, and stamps the number as a genuine folk-song. The narrator is unhappily slightly intoxicated, but no one thinks the worse of him; stern morality on that or any other score will in vain be looked for in songs of the West."

Such a picture as this must have occurred again and yet again in young Kennicott's life whilst head of the ringers at Totnes.

Kennicott's sister was in service as lady's-maid to the Hon. Mrs. Elizabeth Courtney, of Painsford in Ashprington, near Totnes; and in 1743 that lady had a narrow escape from death, having eaten a poisonous