And there is a third stone we can see, full of the quaintness of the 18th century, with an inscription already crumbling away. It was put up by Joseph Gilbanks in memory of the three faithful and affectionate wives he hoped to meet again in the next world, all three having died within 11 years. He was minister here for a generation, and schoolmaster for many years of an 'old grammar school close by.

Some of its famous pupils he taught, and the list of those who came here as boys is a remarkable one. Within a few decades there were William Wordsworth, Fearon Fallows, and Christopher Words worth (who became Master of Trinity at Cambridge). There was Fletcher Christian who led the mutiny on the Bounty. There was the father of the three Queketts, of whom two are remembered in science and the third in Dickens as a model London curate. And there was John Walker, who was blacksmith, engraver, schoolmaster, and doctor, and has been called the Apostle of Vaccination. Pioneer of a Great Idea

HE was born here in 1759, educated at the grammar school, and followed his father's calling as blacksmith until he was 20. Then he turned schoolmaster.

Before he was 30 he had published a volume of geography and history, the success of which led to his travelling widely to prepare a Gazetteer. This ran through six editions in 20 years. Publishing having brought him to London, he studied at Guy's Hospital, after which he took his medical degree, and in 1800 visited Naples with an English doctor and helped to introduce vaccination there.

Jenner had been experimenting with vaccine for a quarter of a century, and had been violently opposed nntil 70 physicians and surgeons signed a declaration in his favor.

Walker, having in the meantime accompanied Sir Ralph Abercromby on his Egyptian expedition, settled in London in 1802, and began a campaign for the new treatment, to which he gave the rest of his life. Eventually a national vaccine board was set up, with Jenner as president and Walker as director, and for 17 years the two men worked together in amity, twin stalwarts in a great work for a pest-ridden nation. Admitted to membership of the College of Physicians, Walker, a

man of simple earnest character, devoted his whole strength to the task, and was able to boast that he had vaccinated more than 100,000 people. A man of liberal ideas, he was among the pioneers of the antislavery crusade, and did much to awaken public opinion to the horror of sacrificing widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands.

CORNEY. Coming to its little church on a lonely hilltop we are rewarded by a splendid view of this fascinating countryside. Far in the valley below a mountain stream chatters under a tiny bridge, and here and there among the hills the farms are dotted. Over the lowlands we look to the sea, and inland rise Black Combe and the rocky crags that guard the lakes and dales.

The church, refashioned last century, has two 17th century bells in the bell cot, but it has little to show of its Norman predecessor founded by Lord Corney and given to the Priory of St Bees. Yet its people must be proud of their length of days, for we saw here on a gravestone that Richard Pullin was 97 when he died, and we have heard that John Noble, who was buried here in 1772, reached the great age of 114, his life stretching from the end of Cromwell's to the beginning of Napoleon's.

He would be only about 95 when there was born at Welcome Nook near here Edward Troughton, famous for the scientific instruments he invented and made in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Many were astronomical instruments for observatories, but it seemed that everything Edward Troughton touched he improved, from telescopes to sextants and barometers. He invented a new and far better way of marking the graduations on the circles so vital in many instruments; he made telescopes for the most accurate work at Greenwich Observatory; he supplied the precision instruments for several famous surveying expeditions; he made compasses and theodolites and pendulums; and altogether his beautiful workmanship and clever ideas found their way into half the countries in the world.