The Argosy — page 331: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

300 Exinoor and its People. harvest time, when the last sheaf is bound up, everyone in the field joins in a loud, ringing, joyful shout, which is meant to proclaim the news to the whole neighbourhood. . Such are some of their strange, old-fashioned usages, and there are many more which we have not space to chronicle here. The west country folk are full of superstitious observances, and strange superstitions and beliefs. On the night before Twelfth day, it is fully believed by every west country man and woman, that the master bullock of the herd, exactly as midnight strikes, lows three times solemnly, and goes down on his knees before the manger. When they are ill, they would far rather go to a seventh son or daughter to be cured than to a doctor. When alittle bird chirps near a window, it is a sure sign of death; so it is when the bees die un- expectedly ; so it is when the cocks crow at night; so it is when a luckless individual fails to hear the cuckoo before Midsummer day. If you give a west country boy a knife, you can never be friends again unless he returns you for it a copper coin. There are witches here in the land, and though they can go to church, they can never turn toward the east while they are there. If the death-bell tolls in some peculiar fashion, only known to the initiated, it is a certain token that someone else will soon die in the parish. If you want to know who are going to depart this life in the village during the present year, you have but to sit up in the church porch on Mid- summer eve, and you will see them all pass by. If a west country girl wishes to know which of her lovers is true, she picks a rose on Midsummer day, and wears it on her breast to church on Christmas day, and he will be sure to come and take it from her bosom, and she may trust him ever after. If an old woman in the west has rheu- matism, she can always cure it by wearing a toad’s leg ina bag round her neck as a charm. | As for dreams, the mind grows uncomfortably bewildered as the west country dame goes through her experiences on this point, and tells us of what we may dream and of what we may not, and relates how, on various occasions, ‘‘her dream was out,” which is the approved west country way of saying that a dream comes true. The manners of the west country folk to strangers are always courteous, but frequently marked with a certain reticence. Many of them have a vague mistrust of everything and everyone they are not accustomed to ; it is sure to take a considerable time to win even their partial confidence when you settle amongthem. In mind they are a singular mixture of shrewdness and simplicity. They will see - through you in a moment if you try to cheat them or make fun of them, and yet many of them live in the most utter ignorance of ways and ideas which are as commonplace as air and sunshine to the dwellers in towns, or in regions that are nearer to the sound of the great world. ‘They have often spent years without going more than a few miles beyond their native parish, and a journey to Taunton is eomiecbooks (e(o)