We crossed the country to visit St. Neot, and as the village was away from the main roads and situated on the fringe of Bodmin Moor, we were surprised to find such a fine church there.  We were informed that St. Neot was the second largest parish in Cornwall, and that the moor beyond had been much more thickly populated in former times.  We had passed through a place of the same name in Huntingdonshire in the previous year, when walking home from London, and had been puzzled as to how to pronounce the name; when we appealed to a gentleman we met on the road outside the town, he told us that the gentry called it St. Netts and the common people St. Noots, but here it was pronounced as spelt, with just a slight stress on the first syllable—­St. Ne-ot, the letter “s” not being sounded officially.

St. Neot, supposed to have been related to King Alfred, being either a brother or an uncle, came here from Glastonbury and built a hermitage near his well, in which he would stand for hours immersed up to his neck in the water in order “to mortify his flesh and cultivate his memory,” while he recited portions of the Psalter, the whole of which he could repeat from memory.  Though a dwarf, he was said to be able to rescue beasts from the hunters and oxen from the thieves, and to live on two miraculous fishes, which, though he ate them continually, were always to be seen sporting in the water of his well!

St. Neot was the original burial-place of the saint, and in the church there was a curious stone casket or reliquary which formerly contained his remains; but when they were carried off to enrich Eynesbury Abbey at the Huntingdon St. Neots, all that was left here was a bone from one of his arms.  This incident established the connection between the two places so far apart.

[Illustration:  TRETHEVY STONES, LISKEARD.]

The church had a beautiful Decorated tower and a finely carved sixteenth-century roof, but its great glory consisted in its famous stained-glass windows, which were fifteen in number, and to each of which had been given a special name, such as the Young Women’s Window, the Wives’ Window, and so on, while St. Neot’s window in its twelve panels represented incidents in the life of that saint.  It was supposed that these fine windows were second to none in all England, except those at Fairford church in Gloucestershire, which we had already seen, and which were undoubtedly the finest range of mediaeval windows in the country.  They were more in number, and had the great advantage of being perfect, for in the time of the Civil War they had been taken away and hidden in a place of safety, and not replaced in the church until the country had resumed its normal condition.

The glass in the lower panels of the windows in the Church of St. Neot’s, Cornwall, had at that time been broken, but had been restored, the subjects represented being the same as before.  Those windows named after the young women and the wives had been presented to the church in the sixteenth century by the maids and mothers of the parish.