VIII] BEDFORDSHIRE: TURVEY 123 



wished to find out the mystery. He was an enthusiastic 

 naturalist, and we talked of many things, and the conversa- 

 tion turning on the land question, he remarked that he 

 was perhaps one of the poorest landowners in Eng- 

 land, for that he was heir to a considerable landed estate 

 from which he never received anything, and probably never 

 should, owing to family circumstances, which he stated. I 

 then asked him if he knew a place called Turvey, in Bed- 

 fordshire, to which he replied, " I ought to know it, for I was 

 born there, and my father owned the estate there to which I 

 am heir." I then felt pretty sure of my man, and asked him 

 if he remembered, during a very hard frost about fifty years 

 ago, shooting a pair of wild swans at Turvey. " Why, of course 

 I do," said he. ^ But how do you know it ? " Because I 

 was there at the time and saw you shoot them. Do not you 

 remember a thin tall lad who came up to you and said, 

 * That was a good shot,' and you replied, * Oh ! you can't miss 

 them, they are as big as a barn door ' ? " " No," he said, I 

 don't remember you at all, but that is just what I should 

 have said." His delight was great, for his story of how he 

 shot the two wild swans was not credited even by his own 

 family, and he made me promise to go to his house after the 

 lecture on the next night, and prove to them that he had 

 not been romancing. And when I went, I was duly intro- 

 duced to his grown-up sons and daughters as one who had 

 been present at the shooting of the swans, which I had been 

 the first to mention. That was a proud moment for the 

 Rev. H. H. Higgins, and a very pleasant one to myself. 



Let us now return to Turvey and my experiences there. 

 We lived at the chief inn in the place — perhaps the -only 

 one except some small beer-shops — called The Tinker of 

 Turvey. The painted sign was a man with a staff, a woman, 

 and a dog, and we were told in the village that the tinker 

 meant was John Bunyan. But recent inquiry by a friend 

 both in Bedford and at Turvey shows that this is perhaps 

 a mistake. In a little book, " Turvey and the Mordaunts," by 

 G. F. W. Munby, Rector of Turvey, and Thomas Wright 

 (of Olney), we are told that there is a very rare pamphlet in 



