244 EARLY REMINISCENCES Presbyterian, a Socinian, or a Baptist Prime Minister, nominates to our vacant mitres and decanal stalls. As already said, during the Long Vacation I was wont to ride about the country visiting churches, and crossing the Moor exploring its antiquities. I had a most docile pony, black, named Hilda. I used to delight in summer to wreath her head in wild roses, and to enclose a glow-worm in each unfolded blossom, to the great astonishment of the villagers as I rode through a street or past detached cottages at night. On one of these excursions I went to Kenton, and was struck by the beauty of the pulpit. The body had been scooped out of one enormous oak tree. The sculpture, that was both bold and delicate, was applied. I spent a day making a working drawing. The pulpit was gilt and coloured, and I copied it in colours. In 1888 I revisited the church that had, in the meantime been " restored " by Hayward, the Exeter architect. To my dismay the pulpit was gone, and a contemptible modern erection replaced it, of the type of those supplied by ecclesiastical tailors and furnishers. I have represented it in An Old English Home. I went at once to the Vicarage to inquire what had become of the old pulpit, the carving of which was so superior to any I had seen in Devon, that I thought it must have been executed by Flemish workmen. The vicar replied that he did not know. The architect had condemned it, and it was swept away, but he believed that some scraps of carving were preserved in the school. So I went to the school-house, and there, in the cupboard among dusters, chalk, and broken slates was a considerable amount of carved, coloured and gilt oak that I at once recognized as having belonged to the massacred old pulpit. The vicar and churchwardens consented to this heap of carving being sent to me at Lew, where I compared it with my old working drawing. All of it was there, except one bay that had been given to Lord Halifax, and the delicate network of tracery that had enveloped the curved stem supporting the cup of the pulpit. In 1890 a new vicar was appointed, the Rev. W. P. S. Bingham, and I wrote to him about the pulpit. His predecessor had cared nothing for works of art. Mr. Bingham was made of better stuff, and he at once undertook to get the old pulpit restored
