...  Mr. Edward Ashton, husband of Mrs.
izabeth Ashton, of Hawke's Point,
Carbis Bay, died at Hawke's Point, on
Thursday. Mr. Ashton was eighty-seven
years of age. Besides the widow, he
leaves one married daughter.

There can be few visitors to Carbis
Bay, and, indeed, to St. Ives, who are
not acquainted with the cosy arborial
tea-gardens on the verge of the towering
cliff between Carbis Bay and Lelant,
where Mr. Ashton and his wife have
lived for so many years; and who,
knowing those gardens and that happy
cottage set above the golden sands and
the ever speakiog sea, are not. familiar
with the sturdy, hearty figure of wonder-
ful Mrs. Ashton's late husband. For,
during the greater part of their sixty-
four years of married life, they have
spent their leisure hours, and all of
their retirement, in the quiet hill-top
home, so that Mrs. Ashton and her
daughter, though they must needs feel
the loss the greatest, are not the only
ones who will miss Mr. Ashton.

For over fifty years, he had a chemistry
and photographic establishment in St.
Ives, which he ran in conjunction with
his wife and his late brother, for Mrs.
Ashton is a qualified chemist, as all of
her many friends may not know.   And
there was a great deal more in photo-
graphy and chemistry in those days, at
any rate, so far as the local exponent
was concerned, than there is to-day.
Nearly every medicine and remedy that
a chemist stocked he had to make him-
self, on the premises, and, if he would
deal in photography as well, he must
needs all but manufacture his plates
from the beginning, and produce his
own printing paper into the bargain.
You had “to carry a house with you " if
you went out to.take a photograph, Mrs.
Ashton told me.

Mr. Ashton was born in Plymouth,
and went to St. Ives in 1866, his wife
joining him a year later.   He had a shop
at Hayle before long, and another at
St. Just.   When you look at the in-
numerable negatives that he has kept in
his possession for so many years, you
realize that the man had much of the
artist in him ;   well-balanced pictures,
none of them strained ;  each something
to study, something to breed thought
as you took at them.   You get this im-
pression of his character confirmed in
your mind when you learn that for
nineteen years, he, together with his
wife and brother, ran a mine at Hawke’s
Point, and delved for cobalt, nickel, and
peacock copper, and that the three of
them, in a furnace-house on the cliff-
top, spent the whole of many a night
in the analysing and chemical dissection
of ores!

Let me refer again to those photo-
gaphs of his ;   I cannot pass them by.
No man of artistic temperament, who
knew the ways of a camera, could live
for fifty years in St. Ives and not make
true picture-records of the town and its
gradual change.    Mr. Ashton hoarded,
if you will, almost every picture that he
took of the town and district ;   nothing
would induce him to part with a nega-
tive that he liked, and he liked nearly
all he made.   Probably, he destroyed all
those he didn’t like.   And so we have,
in this great collection of photographic
negatives, an invaluable and vast store of
picture-history covering a long period in
St. Ives, faithful in ~ detail ;  perfect in
artistic understanding.   Here is a gar-
nered harvest, rich in the story of St.
Ives, and each unit a picture of life and  movement.  Nothing should prevent
their permanent preservation.

All who know Mrs. Ashton will sym-
pathise with her and her daughter in
their recent loss.   But little “Granny”
Ashton still has her work to attend to,
still means to call upon her marvellous
hands, with their life-giving electrical
properties.   (I say electrical, for want
of a better word ;   not she nor anyone
else quite knows what it is in her that
ripples the curative current of nervous
energy from her supple fingers).   For
fifty years she has worked unbelievable
but actual cures by the treatment of
her hands upon innumerable patients,
and the older (in years) that she grows,
the more powerful the gift appears to
become.

Mr. Ashton’s death was brought about
as the result of the abrasion from a nail
in his boot, last November.   Trouble de-
veloped and intensified,  and culminated
in his death on Thursday.   He was re-
ceived into the Catholic faith a fortnight
before he died, and the funeral, at which
the Rev. Father Bovenizer (St. Ives) offi-
ciated, took place at the Lelant cemetery.