The maker was Mr. Deacon, a Baptist minister of Barton-in-the-Beans, who began life as a farm boy when he was eleven years of age.  A gentleman happened to call on the farmer one evening and had some nuts given to him, and as he could not crack them, one of the other servants said to the boy, “Sam, bring the wooden nut-crackers you made!” When the boy brought them, the visitor, after cracking a nut, examined them carefully for some time, and was so struck with the ingenuity displayed in their construction that he took the lad and apprenticed him to a clock-maker in Leicester, where he became one of the cleverest workmen in the kingdom, the most elaborate and curious piece of mechanism he made being this wonderful clock.

We returned from Lutterworth by a different route, for we were now off to see Peeping Tom at Coventry; but our experiments on the roads were not altogether satisfactory, for we got lost in some by-roads where there was no one to inquire from, and eventually reached the snug little village of Monks Kirby.  Here, according to the name of the village, we should at one time have found a Danish settlement, and at another a church belonging to the monks; but on this occasion we found a church and a comfortable-looking inn opposite to it, where we called for an early tea.  This was quickly served and disposed of, and shortly afterwards we reached, coming from the direction of the High Cross, the Fosse, or Foss-way, one of the four great roads made by the Romans in England, so named by them because there was a fosse, or ditch, on each side of it.  We walked along its narrow and straight surface until we came to a road which crossed it, and here, about halfway between Rugby and Coventry, we turned to the right, leaving the “fosse” to continue its course across Dunsmore Heath, where in ancient times Guy, the famous Earl of Warwick, slew the terrible Dun Cow of Dunsmore, “a monstrous wyld and cruell beast.”  The village of Brinklow was now before us, presenting a strange appearance as we walked towards it from the brook below, for at the entrance stood a lofty mound formerly a Roman camp, while behind it was a British tumulus.  In the Civil War there was much fighting all along the road from here to Coventry, and Cromwell’s soldiers had not left us much to look at in the church, as the windows had all been “blown out” at that time, leaving only some small pieces of stained glass.  The church, however, was quite a curiosity, for it sloped with the hill, and was many feet lower at the Tower end than at the east.  We walked along a rather steep inclined plane until we came to a flight of four steps which landed us on the chancel floor, where another inclined plane brought us up to the foot of the two steps leading to the altar; we were told that there was only one other church built in such a form “in all England.”  We were now well within the borders of the county of Warwickshire, which, with the other two Midland Counties of Worcestershire