flags. The tardy Puritan cannon, too slow to
climb the ascent, were also taken—four brass
guns (two of them twelve-pounders), one iron
saker, shot and powder in quantities, besides
heaps of pikes, swords, muskets, pistols, and
carbines. Ruthen fled to Saltash, whence he was
soon driven, with the loss of eighty men and all
his colours. After this battle, Hopton rested at
Liskeard, established quarters there, and
celebrated a solemn thanksgiving. Charles the
First also came there twice; once in 1644, and
once in 1645. In 1620 Liskeard was represented
by Sir Edward Coke, who is always chained to
Littleton in legal memories. In 1775 Edward
Gibbon, the historian, was returned for
Liskeard, and the next year produced the first
volume of his great work, the Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire. Two learned
men Liskeard boasts of having educated at
its grammar school—two learned but two
very different men—Dr. Wolcot and Dean
Prideaux. Dr. Wolcot, the son of a Devonshire
doctor, first apprenticed to a Cornish apothecary,
then a clergyman in Jamaica, practised
medicine at Truro and Exeter, and became
satirist and tormentor of old King George in
London. He nobly threw up the pension
with which government silenced him, when he
found he had to write for the administration he
despised. He was buried at St. Paul's, Covent
Garden. His coffin, at his special request, being
placed touching that of Butler—Hudibras Butler.
Prideaux was a Padstow man; his
comprehensive work, The Connexion between the
Old and New Testament, is not yet entirely
obsolete. He was a learned and virtuous man,
who would have been made a bishop, but,
suffering from chronic illness, resigned the duty
which he could not perform, and made his
library his home.

The crow has not far to fly from Liskeard to
St. Keyne's Well on the road to West Looe.
This saint, unappreciated (except through
Southey) out of her own parish, was the
daughter of Braganus, a Brecknockshire prince,
and came to Cornwall, on a pilgrimage to St.
Michael's Mount with her nephew St. Cadoc,
who followed to persuade her to return. Being
thirsty as they got near Liskeard, St. Cadoc
stuck his enchanted staff in the earth, and there
instantly gushed out a pure limpid spring which
still flows in that green lane near St. Keyne's
church. The well is walled in, and from the
earth over it grow five trees— an oak, a noble
elm, and three ash—which were planted about
1742, by one of the Rashleighs. St. Keyne
endowed the water of the spring with a miraculous
property. Whichever could first drink of it,
after marriage, whether husband or wife,
became henceforth the master. Southey, partly
following Carew's earlier lines, wrote a pleasant
ballad on the subject. The closing verse is full
of very quiet humour:

I hasten'd as soon as the wedding was o'er
And left my good wife in the porch;
But i'faith she had been wiser than I,
For she took a bottle to church.

Local historians tell the story differently.
There were two sisters, they say, daughters of
a Liskeard farmer, who were married, at an
interval of several years apart. The first, Jane,
a gentle girl, refused her sister's help to outwit
her bridegroom, and she and her lover
good-naturedly agreed that neither should visit the
dangerous well. Mary, the older and more
stubborn girl, promised the widower who
married her not to run off to the well the moment
the last "Amen" was uttered, as he said it
would make him appear foolish to the neighbours;
but just before the dinner on the
wedding day, the bride called the man apart and
said, "Dear Robert, now we are alone I may
drink;" then, pulling out a bottle, she tossed
off the magic water.

Close to Liskeard is St. Neot's, and the crow
stays a moment to look in at the church window
and record another legend of an eccentric
Cornish saint. St. Neot was, according to some
historians, the uncle of King Alfred, according
to others, a poor shepherd, whose first successful
miracle was the impounding in a ring of
stones, still shown on Gonzion Down, and
uncommonly resembling an old fort, a flock of
contumacious crows that had made forays upon
his wheat field. Following up this first success,
St. Neot went to Rome, returned, became a
hermit, and eventually getting tired of solitude,
founded a monastery, to make other people suffer
what he had already suffered himself. In a well
near the monastery, his guardian angel placed
two fish, which were never to diminish as
long as the saint took out only one daily for
his frugal dinner. The saint, however, soon
fell ill, and growing dainty and tetchy in his
appetite, his servant Barius, in his over zeal to
tempt his master to eat, one day scooped up
both the fish, and nolens volens, boiled one and
fried the other. The saint, aghast at the sin of
Barius, instantly fell on his knees to appease
heaven till the cooked fish could be thrown back
into the spring. The servant was forgiven; the
moment the fish touched the water it began
to sport and leap, and the saint falling to at his
permitted meal was instantly restored to health.
At another time St. Neot was praying near
the well, in which he used daily to chant the
whole Psalter with the water up to his chin,
when a hunted deer came and cowered by his
side for protection; the dogs on their arrival,
reproved by the saint, crouched at his feet, and
the astonished huntsman on seeing these miracles
renounced the world, and hung his bugle horn
up in the cloister as a votive offering. On
another occasion some wild deer came of their own
accord from the forest to replace some oxen
which had been stolen from the saint. The
thieves, seeing St. Neot ploughing with the
deer, were so conscience stricken that they at
once returned the cattle. There is also no doubt
that St. Neot built this church mysteriously by
night, and that magical teams of two deer and
one hare drew all the stone used in its building.
St. Neot was a little man, and they say that he
had two ways of opening the church door—one
by throwing up the key into the keyhole,
another by bidding the lock descend to him.