No information is to be gleaned from the parish registers or the books I have inspected relative to what occurred at Newton during the time of the Prince’s visit, but I have been favoured with the following interesting story from a lady now residing at Newton, of the advanced age of ninety-six, told her by her father, who heard it from his grandmother, who was a Miss Joan Bearne, the daughter of Mr. Bearne, a lawyer of Newton Abbot; viz., that when a girl of sixteen, there was a stranger staying at her father’s house for about three weeks, who was only known as “the gentleman,” and who was out during the day, and only returned in the evening; that on the entry of William of Orange into Newton from Ford House, her father took her out to see him, and that walking by the side of the Prince was the strange gentleman, who, on passing where Mr. Bearne was standing, pointed him out as “his host for three weeks” to the Prince, who at once lifted his hat to him. [Illustration: leaf] [This paper having been written in 1880, sundry allusions must be interpreted in the light of that circumstance.—THE EDITOR.] REYNOLDS’ BIRTHPLACE. BY JAMES HINE, F.R.I.B.A. Any interest attaching to Plympton belongs to the olden time. Of many other places it may be said that the new has entirely supplanted the old. Modern business requirements, new warehouses, and thoroughfares, have had the effect of stamping out all vestiges of the past, and even the traditions of them. An unpretending Railway Station and a dozen or more new houses have not had this effect at Plympton. The town has no novelties to shew us; the lions are just what they were two hundred years ago. Plympton in the olden time had its castle and its priory, its two churches, and later its Guildhall and Grammar School. Not quite in the olden time, but only just on the verge of our prosaic modern time, Plympton gave to the world England’s greatest painter—a circumstance which (though forgotten by the native, who on being asked by a tourist where Sir Joshua Reynolds was born, replied he “never heeard of sich”) should indeed make this honoured little town almost as famous as Stratford-on-Avon. In the Doomsday Book, Plympton is designated “Terra Regis,” so also are Tavistock, Ashburton, and Tiverton, “all which places were then the King’s demesne towns,” but not boroughs. [Illustration _From an Engraving_] [_by J. E. Wood._ THE CLOISTERS, PLYMPTON GRAMMAR SCHOOL. ] [Illustration _From an Engraving_] [_By J. E. Wood._ NORMAN DOORWAY, PLYMPTON PRIORY. ]