In the summer of 1864, the American literary blacksmith, Elihu Burritt, spent three days with Capern, on his “Walk from London to the Land’s End and back,” and gave an excellent description of his host. He says: “Edward Capern, of Bideford, is a poet, and he is a postman, and both at once, and good at each. He is as faithful and genial a postman as ever dropped a letter in a cottage door, with an honest and welcome face, itself a living epistle of good will and friendly cheer. I can attest to that most confidently; for I went with him in his pony-cart two days on his rural rounds. That he is a poet who has written songs that will live and have a pleasant place among the productions of genius, I am equally confident, though pretending to be no connoisseur in such matters myself. Better judges have awarded to them a high degree of merit. Already a considerable volume of his songs and ballads has gone to its second edition; and he has sufficient matter on hand to make another of equal size and character. His postal beat lies between Bideford and Buckland Brewer, a distance of more than six miles. Up to quite a recent date, he walked this distance twice a day in all weathers; starting off on winter mornings while it was yet dark. Having grown somewhat corpulent and short-winded, he has mounted, within a year or two, a pony-cart, that carries him up and down the long, steep hills on his course. It takes him till noon to ascend these to Buckland and distribute letters and papers among the hamlet cottages and roadside farmhouses on the way. Having reached the little town on the summit-hill, and left his bag at the post-office, he has three hours to wait before setting out on his return journey. These are his writing hours; and he spends them in a little, antique, thatched cottage in one of the village streets. Here, seated at one end of a long deal table, while the cottager’s wife and daughters are plying their needles, and doing all their family work at the other, he pens down the thoughts that have passed through the flitting visions of his imagination while alone on the road. Here he wrote most of his first book of ballads, and here he is working up his glowing rollicking songs for a new volume. Sometimes the poetic inspiration comes in upon him like a flood on his way. He told me that he once brought home with him six sonnets on six different subjects, which he had thought out and penned in one of his daily beats. When the news of the taking of the Redan reached England, the very inner soul of his patriotism was stirred within him to the proudest emotion. As he walked up and down the long hills with his letter-bags strapped to his side, the thoughts of the glory his country had won came into his mind with a half-suffocating rush, and he struggled, nearly drowned by them, to give them forms of speech. The days were short, the road was long, and hard to foot, and the rules of the postal service were rigid. He could not hold fast the thoughts the