and asked her to help him out of his difficulties by putting on an old dress and an awkward appearance when the king came, so that his life might be spared.  Elfrida was, however, disappointed at the loss of a crown, and, instead of obscuring her beauty, she clothed herself so as to appear as beautiful as possible, and, as she expected, captivated the royal Edgar.  A few days afterwards Athelwold was found murdered in a wood, and the king married his widow.  But the union, beginning with crime, could not be other than unhappy, and ended disastrously, the king only surviving his marriage six or seven years and dying at the early age of thirty-two.  He was buried at Glastonbury, an abbey he had greatly befriended.

At the Dissolution the lands of Tavistock Abbey were given by King Henry VIII, along with others, to Lord John Russell, whose descendants, the Dukes of Bedford, still possess them.  Considerable traces of the old abbey remained, but, judging from some old prints, they had been much altered during the past century.  The fine old chapter-house had been taken down to build a residence named Abbey House, which now formed the Bedford Hotel; the old refectory had been used as a Unitarian chapel, and its porch attached to the premises of the hotel; while the vicarage garden seemed to have absorbed some portion of the venerable ruins.  There were two towers, one of which was named the Betsey Grinbal’s Tower, as a woman of that name was supposed to have been murdered there by the monks; and between that and the other tower was an archway which connected the two.  Under this archway stood a Sarcophagus which formerly contained the remains of Ordulph, whose gigantic thigh-bones we afterwards saw in the church.  The ruins were nearly all covered with ivy, and looked beautiful even in their decay; but seeing the purpose to which some of them had been applied, we thought that the word “Ichabod” (the glory hath departed) would aptly apply, and if the old walls could have spoken, we should not have been surprised to hear a line quoted from Shakespeare—­“to what base uses do we come at last.”

[Illustration:  THE STILL TOWER, TAVISTOCK ABBEY]

The old abbey had done good service in its time, as it had given Tavistock the claim of being the second town in England where a printing press was erected, for in 1524 one had been put up in the abbey, and a monk named Rychard had printed a translation of Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae, and a Saxon Grammar was also said to have been printed there.  The neighbourhood of Tavistock was not without legends, which linger long on the confines of Dartmoor, and, like slander, seemed to have expanded as time went on: 

  The flying rumours gathered as they rolled,
  Scarce any tale was sooner heard than told,
  And all who told it added something new,
  And all who heard it made enlargement too! 
  On every ear it spread, on every tongue it grew.