'The old almshouses, for five poor men in
Gold-street, were built by the same John Greenway
who did so much for the church, and they
are enriched in the same elaborate and quaint
manner. They are quiet harbours for the last
moorings of five old men, apart from the noise
and conflict of the world. On the wall of the
chapel are the lines:

         Have grace, yo men, and ever pray
         For the souls of John and Joan Greenway.

The eagle on a bundle of sticks (a nest),
Greenway's device, is still to be seen here.

Tiverton is famous for its factory and its fifteen
hundred lace makers. Devonshire was always
famous for this human spider work, so graceful
and so fragile. The famous Honiton pillow
lace has been now superseded by cheap
machine-made bobbin net; but machinery does
not think as the hand does, and the result is
far less refined and intellectual. Devonshire
lace making was first introduced by fugitive
Flemish protestants in the reign of Elizabeth.

A short flight lands the crow on to the Grecian
portico of Silverton Park, not so much because
the great Greek building belongs to the Egremont
family, as because it enshrines that portrait
of Sir Joshua Reynolds, which the worthy Devonshire
man painted in his honest pride and delight
at being elected mayor of his native town—- "an
honour which he used to say had given him
more pleasure than any other he had received
during his life." His father had been master
of the great school of Plympton. The
corporation disgracefully sold this palladium of theirs
to the fifth earl of Egremont for one hundred
and fifty pounds.

A skim over the Egremont shrubberies
brings the crow to Bickleigh Court, once a
seat of the Carews; now only a farm house.
The place recals a thousand legends, dear to
schoolboy days, and not without some charm
now, of that ingenious and half-crazed vagabond,
Bamfylde Moore Carew, "the king of
the beggars." Carew, the son of the rector of
Bickleigh, was born seven years before the
accession of Queen Anne. Bamfylde's scrapes
began at Tiverton, where he led the stag hounds
over some corn fields, and then ran away from
school to avoid punishment. He joined some
gipsies, and soon became conspicuous among
them by his skill in disguise and begging, and
his fondness for the wild, free, yet dissolute and
lawless life.

Soon after being chosen king of the beggars,
Carew was arrested at Barnstaple, sent to
Exeter, and there, without trial, sentenced to
transportation to Maryland for five years. At
this time transported men were sold to the
planters. Carew soon escaped from his master,
and, flying to the woods, got among the
Indians, and was helped by them on towards
Pennsylvania. On returning to England,
Carew, occasionally visiting his family in
disguise, continued his career of beggar and small
swindler, passing off as a shipwrecked sailor,
broken-down farmer, or old rag woman;
occasionally owning himself to friends of his
family, and rejoicing quite as much in his own
ingenuity and the success of his disguises as in
the money he obtained. He is said, in old
chap books, to have made money by successes
in the lottery, and to have eventually returned
to Bickleigh, and died there in 1758.

It seems remarkable how such a book as the
Life of Bamfylde Moore Carew could ever have
remained a popular chap book for a whole
century; for, except his adventures among the
Indians, and the narrative of his two transportations,
the biography is little but a series of tricks
to extort money. One day he was an old beggar
woman laden with children, in her arms and on
her back; the next day a burnt-out blacksmith,
the day after a rheumatic miser. A mad Tom,
a shipwrecked sailor, or a rat-catcher, Carew
could assume any disguise at a moment's notice,
always to the confusion of justices of the peace
and the bleeding of the benevolent. The
editor of one edition of the Life of Bamfylde
Moore Carew thinks it necessary to defend his
hero. "The morality of our hero," he says,
apologetically, "is obvious in the various
reflections he makes as he finds himself in different
situations. His lessons are from the vast
volume of nature; and though he passed but
for a beggar, yet he often appears to have
possessed every charm of the mind, and what is
more worthy of praise—those better qualities of
the heart, without which the others are but
frivolous." Modern readers find in the rogue's
adventures no trace of anything but promptitude
and ingenuity.

A mile or two from Bickleigh the crow flits
down to Cadbury Castle, on its isolated hill,
where Romans once encamped, and which in
1645 Fairfax's army occupied. It looks across
the Exe to another height called Dolberry, in
Killerton Park. There is an old distich
about these two hills:

If Cadburye Castle and Dolbury Hill delven were
  All England might plough with a golden share.

The country people declare that a flying
dragon, snorting and breathing fire, has been
seen at night flying towards these two hills,
guarding the great treasure hid in them by
kings and warriors long dead. It is singular
that there is another Dolberry on the Mendips,
and that a rhyme almost similar gives hope of
treasure there also. The time has no doubt
come when a systematic investigation of all
such localities as Dolberry should be made.
The result would be in many cases as profitable
as it would be interesting. From Cadbury
many camps can be seen. They lie thick around
Woodbury, Sidbury, Henbury, Dumpdon,
Membury, and Castle Neroche, in Dorsetshire—all
these the warriors of Cadbury may have wished
to watch and supervise. The enclosure, with
a circumference of about five hundred yards,
has two fosses. In the first one there is a pit
six feet deep, probably intended to collect rain
water. It was excavated in 1848, and a curious
finger ring, some gold bracelets, and styles for
writing of late Roman character were found in
it. They had been there for centuries within