The Italians and even the Turks had strong objections to the number thirteen, and it never appeared on any of the doors on the streets of Paris, where, to avoid thirteen people sitting down to dinner, persons named Quatorziennes were invited to make a fourteenth: 

  Jamais on ne devrait
  Se mettre a table treize,
  Mais douze c’est parfait.

My brother thought the saying was only a catch, for it would be equally true to say all would die as one.  He was quite prepared to run the risk of being the thirteenth to sit down to dinner, but that was when he felt very hungry, and even hinted that there might be no necessity for the others to sit down at all!

But we must return to Totnes and its bridge, and follow the long narrow street immediately before us named Fore Street until we reach “the Arch,” or East Gate.  The old-fashioned houses to the right and left were a great attraction to my brother, who had strong antiquarian predilections, and when he saw the old church and castle, he began to talk of staying there for the rest of the day and I had some difficulty in getting him along.  Fortunately, close at hand there was a quaint Elizabethan mansion doing duty as a refreshment house, with all manner of good things in the windows and the word “Beds” on a window in an upper storey.  Here we called for refreshments, and got some coffee and some good things to eat, with some of the best Devonshire cream we had yet tasted.  After an argument in which I pointed out the danger of jeopardising our twenty-five-mile average walk by staying there, as it was yet early in the forenoon, we settled matters in this way; we would leave our luggage in Totnes, walk round the town to the objects of greatest interest, then walk to Dartmouth and back, and stay the night on our return, thus following to some extent the example of Brutus, the earliest recorded visitor: 

  Here I stand and here I rest,
  And this place shall be called Totnes.

[Illustration:  TOTNES CHURCH WALK]

There was no doubt about the antiquity of Totnes, for Geoffrey of Monmouth, the author of the famous old English Chronicle, a compilation from older authors, in his Historia Britonum, 1147, began his notes on Totnes not in the time of the Saxons nor even with the Roman Occupation, but with the visit of Brutus, hundreds of years before the Christian era.  Brutus of Troy had a strange career.  His mother died in giving him birth, and he accidentally shot his father with an arrow when out hunting.  Banished from Italy, he took refuge in Greece, where it was said he married a daughter of the King, afterwards sailing to discover a new country.  Arriving off our shores, he sailed up the River Dart until he could get no farther, and then landed at the foot of the hill where Totnes now stands.  The stone on which he first set foot was ever afterwards known as Brutus’s stone, and was removed for safety near to the centre of the town; where for ages the mayor or other official gave out all royal proclamations from it, such as the accessions to the throne—­the last before our visit having been that of her most gracious Majesty Queen Victoria.