The Rev. J. R. Chanter, Vicar of
Parracombe, married a Miss Kingsley. He himself is the author of a
short monograph on Lundy, a book which is now very scarce, but which
can be seen at the London Library, at the Bideford Public Library, and
at the Athenaeum at Barnstaple. The Kingsleys and the Chanters are
closely connected through two generations, and the strain of authorship
seems to persist in them, one member after another displaying an
exceptional talent. Miss Vallings, the young author of a quickly
celebrated novel, "Bindweed," is a granddaughter of Mr. Chanter, and a
grandniece of Kingsley's; and the bold and original writer "Lucas
Mallet" is Canon Kingsley's daughter, and a niece of Henry Kingsley.

CHAPTER III

BARNSTAPLE

Barnstaple is a pleasant English country town, with that air of
cleanliness and quiet prosperity, of excellent sanitation and odd
historic corners, side by side with big new modern buildings and
exquisite green gardens where the old gnarled apple-trees are afroth with
blossom in the spring, which is the peculiar flavour of an English
country town. The incongruity is the charm; you step from a modern
drapery store, with a respectable display of plate-glass, on to the clean
narrow pavement, and find yourself looking down a small dark passage
opposite, into a sunny paved court, where the houses are cream-washed,
and the roofs are atilt in odd delicious angles, and the casement windows
have still the old diamond panes of Elizabeth's day, and the sun lies
slanting across the pots of wallflower, and the small boys play marbles
as they played marbles there when the Armada sailed. Barnstaple is a
thriving little modern town, but it has many such charming scenes to the
visitor with an observant eye--a narrow cobbled street, with an irregular
sag of gabled houses either side, the cream and rose-coloured walls
mellow and sunny in the late afternoon, or a cluster of really beautiful
half-timbered houses of the sixteenth century, with carved oak doorposts
and beam-ends, such as those which are known as Church Row, and stand
back from the road, between Boutport Street, and the High Street, by St.
Peter's Church and St. Anne's Chapel. St. Peter's Church, which stands
between these two main streets in the very centre of the town, is of the
fourteenth century, and has a fine leaded spire, considered to be one of
the finest in Europe, which the nineteenth century was anxious to
abolish, and rep