Chapter 58

From Altarnon he went to Fowey, and the late Sir Charles Lemon, of Carclew, took him by the hand. At the age of sixteen he carved in slate the group of Laocoon, sent in 1834 to the Exhibition of the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society at Falmouth. This carving in bass-relief, executed by a boy from a wild moorland village, without instruction, copied from a wood-cut in the _Penny Magazine_, and with tools of his own making, was considered so very remarkable a production that the Society awarded him a silver medal. N…