in the waning fortunes of the Royalists, to remove him further West. Meanwhile, the Parliamentary forces under Fairfax were coming, beating down Royalist resistance as they came. At length, in April 1646, they besieged Barum, and, nearly all else being lost to them in the West, the Royalists in five weeks finally laid down their arms. Barnstaple old parish church is a great roomy building, its walls plentifully furnished with monuments of the old merchants. It stands in an alley known as Paternoster Row; its wooden, lead-sheathed spire, like that of Braunton, warped on one side, and in like manner. A plain white tablet on the exterior wall reads: Beneath lie the Remains of John Wheatly a Native of Salisbury who died an unprofitable Servant the 21 Day of September 1774 aged 82 Years This hints mysteriously of a misspent life, but no one knows anything of the circumstances. Almost adjoining the church stands what was formerly St. Anne’s Chapel. At the Reformation, it became the Grammar School, and so remains. Between 1686 and 1761 it was also used, by permission of the Corporation, as a chapel, by the French Protestant refugees who had fled from the persecution of the Huguenots. A tablet facing Paternoster Row is to the memory of Thomas Lee, architect, drowned at Morthoe, 1834. The River Taw is now bordered up-stream with leafy promenades, and by the Rock Park, another of the modern innovations upon the old order of things. To those who--seeing no rocks, but only smooth lawns and much landscape-gardening in the park--object that this pleasance belies its name, it is a sufficient reply to state that it was the gift of Mr. W. F. Rock, a native of Barum, and a member of the London firm of wholesale stationers, Rock Brothers. And the river Taw runs past, over its broad bed of sand, or swirls fiercely up at the flood tide from the sea, bringing up seaweed and driftwood, and sometimes a fragment of wreck from the channel. The wisdom of not retrieving all and every description of “wreck of the sea” seems to be pointed out by the sad seventeenth-century story of the four (not seven) brother fishermen who, fishing, after their daily custom, in the estuary of the Taw long ago, hauled ashore a bundle of rugs and bedding, floating up on the tide. It would appear that these articles had been flung overboard from some ship afflicted with the plague, for the fishermen themselves died of it and were buried up river, off Tawstock, at a point still known, by an odd confusion of ideas, as “Seven Brethren Bank”; the spot having originally been marked by seven elms. A tombstone, long since vanished, was erected by Thomas and Agnes Ley, parents of the unhappy fishermen, with the inscription: “To the memory of our four sweet sons, John, Joseph, Thomas, and Richard, who, immaturely taken from us altogether by Divine Providence, are Hear inter’d, the 17 August, Anno 1646.