Cornish Characters and Strange Events. Baring-Gould Sabine

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СКАЧАТЬ Rev. P. T. Pulman, vicar of South Petherwin, writes to me: "In December, 1896, a labourer died here, aged seventy-two. For upwards of forty years he had worked at Botathan. He told me that one of the fields was called the Higher Brown Park (he did not know the name of Quartells) until the field was ploughed up. He told me there was a little path in it which they called old Dorothy Dinglet's [sic] path, and that they used to frighten the farm apprentices with stories about her, but he had never met her himself. The farm has been sold of recent years. There is a part of the old house left used for a cider cellar. They call it Dorothy Dingley's chamber."

      The Rev. James Dingley was vicar of South Petherwin from 1682 until 1695. He was born 1655, just ten years before the apparition was seen by young Bligh.

      Authorities: A. Robbins, "A Cornish Ghost Story," in the Cornish Magazine, 1898; A. Robbins, Launceston Past and Present, 1889. The portrait of the Rev. John Ruddle is in my possession. The descendants of Parson Ruddle or Rudall are still on the land, but are in a humble condition.

      JOHN COUCH ADAMS, ASTRONOMER

      Thomas Adams was a small tenant farmer in the parish of Laneast, at Lidcott, renting under John King Lethbridge, Esq., of Tregeare, in Laneast. He married Tabitha Knill Grylls, of Stoke Climsland, who inherited a very little land in this latter parish.

      Laneast lies on the Inny River – that is to say, the village with its church occupies the southern slope of Laneast Down that falls to this beautiful stream. But Lidcott lies on the north side of the down, that rises to eight hundred feet above the sea, one long swelling mass of moor brown with heather, save when in August it blushes like a modest girl, the heather all a-rose with flower.

      For three miles the highway from Camelford to Launceston crosses this moor, one white strip drawn through a mass of umber. At night the sheep that grazed on the down would lie on the warm road, and many a time have the coach-horses stumbled over them in the night.

      On this road, about the year 546, S. Samson was pursuing his way from Padstow, where he had landed, to Southill. He had with him a wagon drawn by horses he had brought with him from Ireland, and as he proceeded over the down he was aware of music and dancing on the left-hand side of the road in the direction of Tregeare, and he found that the heathen people were having a festival about a rude upright stone. He stopped, harangued them, condemned their idolatrous practice, and with his own hand cut a cross upon the stone.

      It is possible that this is the very rude stone cross that still stands on the slope of the moor above Lidcott.

      John Couch, son of Thomas Adams and Tabitha, was born at Lidcott on 5th January, 1819, but no notice of his baptism occurs in the parish register at Laneast. Possibly he may have been taken to Egloskerry.

      He received his early education at a dame's school in his native parish; but was early employed by his father to tend the sheep on Laneast Down. It was then and there, on that great upland stretch of moor, with a vast horizon about him, that, lying in the heather and looking up into the sky, the mystery of the heavenly firmament laid hold of him. He soon learned to distinguish the planets from the fixed stars; he watched the rising and the setting of the constellations, Charles's Wain revolving nightly about the extremest star in what he called the tail of the Plough; Orion with his twinkling belt and curved sword, "louting on one knee."

      To the west and south stood up against the evening glow the ridge of the Bodmin Moors, Brown Willy, Rough Tor, Kilmar, and Caradon. To the north nothing interrupted the view, for there lay the vast Atlantic; and on stormy nights the boom of its waves might be heard from that highway over the down. To the east and south-east the far-off range of Dartmoor, blue as a vein in a girl's temple, on a summer day.

      Many a chiding did John Couch get from his father for being out late at night upon the moor; the old farmer was unable to understand what the attraction was which drew the lad from home and from his supper, to be out, either lying on the road or leaning against the old granite cross, star-gazing. Happily Mrs. Adams had a simple book on astronomy that had belonged to her father, and this her son Jack devoured, and now he began to understand something of the motions of the heavenly bodies. He established a sundial on the window-sill of the parlour, and constructed out of cardboard an apparatus for taking the altitude of the sun.

      His father, finding that his inclinations were not for farm work, sent him to study with a relative of his mother, the Rev. P. Couch Grylls, who had a school at Devonport, but later moved to Saltash. All his spare time John Couch spent in reading astronomical works, which he obtained from the library of the Mechanics' Institute; he drew maps of constellations and computed celestial phenomena. A day long to be remembered by him as one of the happiest in his life was that in which he obtained a look through a telescope at the moon. "Why," he exclaimed, "they have Brown Willy and Rough Tor up there!"

      His account of a solar eclipse viewed at Devonport through a small spyglass got into print in a London paper. After three weeks' watching he caught sight of Halley's Comet on 16th October, 1839.

      His father now with considerable effort arranged to send him to the University of Cambridge, and he entered S. John's College as a poor sizar in October, 1839; he graduated as Senior Wrangler in 1843, and was first Smith's prizeman, and soon elected Fellow and appointed tutor of his college.

      At the age of twenty-two he was struck with the disturbance in the course of the planet Uranus, and he perceived that this must be due to the attraction possessed by some other planet, as yet unseen and unsuspected, that produced these perturbations. How this led to the discovery of the planet Neptune shall be told from the Reminiscences of Caroline Fox: —

      "1847, October 7th. – Dined at Carclew, and spent a very interesting evening. We met Professor Adams, the Bullers, the Lord of the Isles, and others. Adams is a quiet-looking man, with a broad forehead, a mild face, and an amiable and expressive mouth. I sat by him at dinner, and by general and dainty approaches got at the subject on which one most wished to hear him speak. He began very blushingly, but went on to talk in most delightful fashion, with large and luminous simplicity, of some of the vast mathematical facts with which he is so conversant. The idea of the reversed method of reasoning, from an unknown to a known, with reference to astronomical problems dawned on him when an undergraduate, with neither time nor mathematics to work it out. The opposite system had always before been adopted. He, in common with many others, conceived that there must be a planet to account for the disturbances of Uranus; and when he had time he set to work at the process, in deep, quiet faith that the fact was there, and that his hitherto untried mathematical path was the one which must reach it; that there were no anomalies in the universe, but that, even here, and now, they could be explained and included in a higher law. The delight of working it out was far more than any notoriety could give, for his love of pure truth is evidently intense, an inward necessity, unaffected by all the penny trumpets of the world. Well, at length he fixed his point in space, and sent his mathematical evidence to Airy, the Astronomer Royal, who locked the papers up in his desk, partly from carelessness, partly from incredulity, for it seemed to him impossible that a man whose name was unknown to him should strike out a new path in mathematical science with any success. Moreover, his theory was, that if there were a planet, it would not be discovered for one hundred and sixty years; that is, until two revolutions of Uranus had been accomplished. Then came Leverrier's equally original, though many months younger, demonstration; Gull's immediate verification of it by observation; and then the other astronomers were all astir. Professor Adams speaks of those about whom the English scientific world is so indignant in a spirit of Christian philosophy, exactly in keeping with the mind of a man who has discovered a planet. He speaks with warmest admiration of Leverrier, specially of his exhaustive method of making out the orbits of the comets, imagining and disproving all tracks but the right one – a work of infinite labour. If the observer could make out distinctly but a very small part of a comet's orbit, the mathematician would be able to prove what its course had been through all time. They enjoyed being a good deal together СКАЧАТЬ