Descending again into the body of the church, we passed through the Piper Choir, and were next ushered into the vestry, where, to our surprise, we found in addition to the ordinary registers and churchwardens' accounts a library of some three hundred volumes, including many rare and curious works bequeathed to the parish in 1692 by Thomas Preston, of Holker, including a black-letter Bible in six volumes, printed at Basle in 1502; a copy of the works, also in black-letter, of Thomas Aquinas, printed at Vienna in 1509; an incomplete copy of Spenser's "Faerie Queene," dated 1596; a Virgil of the same date; a curious little volume, "Apophthegemes New and Old, collected by the Right Honourable Francis Lo. Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, 1625;" and a folio copy of Foxe's Book of Martyrs. The old clerk sets great store by his literary treasures, and well he may, for they are such as few church libraries can equal, and are in themselves enough to make a collector covetous. The parish registers, which begin in 1559, contain many curious entries relating to local families, and many a sad story of lives lost in crossing the treacherous sands of Morecambe Bay; one of the entries records the disaster which befel a pleasure party, of whom nine were drowned, while crossing the Leven Sands on their return from Ulverston Whitsuntide fair, where they had been to purchase the wedding garments for two of their number who were about to be married.[47] The church accounts contain, among other things, a very complete record of the doings of the "twenty-four sworn men,"[48] an influential body whose jurisdiction extended over a parish nearly fourteen miles in length, and whose duties were as multifarious as they were onerous, embracing almost everything, from exterminating mouldiwarpes (moles) and choosing churchwardens to repairing organs and regaling fox-hunters. But there are other curiosities preserved in the vestry at Cartmel; among them is an umbrella of ancient date and cumbrous proportions, which our cicerone tells us was used in times past to protect the clergyman from the weather when performing the burial service in the graveyard.[49] It is of immense weight, and has a thick oilcloth cover that reminds us of Swift's lines in the _Tatler_-- The tuck'd-up seamstress walks with hasty strides While streams run down her _oiled umbrella_ sides, as well as of Gay's _Trivia_-- Good housewives all the winter's rage despise, Defended by the riding-hood's disguise; Or underneath th' _umbrella's oily shed_, Safe through the wet in clinking pattens tread.