Prominent on the south-east pinnacle of this tower is a curious vane in the shape of a fiddle. The legend told of it says that, many years ago, there wandered amid the fenland villages of Lincolnshire a poor fiddler who gained a scanty livelihood by playing at fairs and weddings, and not infrequently in the parlours of the village inns on Saturday nights. After some years of this itinerant minstrelsy, he amassed a sufficient sum of money wherewith to pay his fare as a steerage passenger to the United States, to which country his relatives had emigrated some time before. In course of time, this once almost poverty stricken fiddler became rich through land speculation in the backwoods; and, revisiting the scenes of his tuneful pilgrimages in the new character of a wealthy man, offered to repair this then dilapidated church, as some sort of recognition of the kindnesses shown him in bygone years. Only one stipulation was made by him, that a vane representing his old fiddle should take the place of the weathercock. This was agreed to, and, as we see, that quaint emblem is there to this day. Candour, however, compels the admission that this pretty legend has no truth in it; but the story has frequently found its way into print, and so is in a fair way to become a classic. The original fell in 1899 and was broken. The then rector would have replaced it with another vane of different character, but the old folk were attached to their fiddle, and so a replica was made by subscription, and fixed; and there it is to-day: the first fiddle, said the rector, that ever he heard of in the guise of a wind-instrument! Among the many curious inn-signs along the road, that of the “Blue Horse,” at Great Ponton, is surely one of the most singular, and is a zoological curiosity not readily explained. XXVII