These Fellows Were A 'Black George' Lot,
In Hamlet Language.
Nestor Hay knew everybody in the village round about,
their fathers and grandfathers, their politics and religious opinions,
and whether they were new folk or ancient inhabitants - an encyclopaedic
knowledge not written, an Homeric memory.
For I imagine in ancient days
when books were scarce that was how men handed down the history of the
chiefs of Troy. An Homeric memory for everything - superstitions,
traditions, anecdotes; the only difficulty was that you could not command
it. You could not turn to letter A or B and demand information direct
about this or that; you must wait till it came up incidentally in
conversation. In one of the villages there was a young men's club, and,
among other advantages, when they were married they could have a cradle
for nothing. A cottager had a child troubled with a slight infirmity; the
doctor ordered the mother to prepare a stew of mice and give him the
gravy. There happened to be some threshing going on, and one of the men
caught her nine mice, which she skinned and cooked. She did not much like
the task, but she did it, and the child never knew but that it was beef
gravy. It cured him completely. This is the second time I have come
across this curious use of mice. I had heard of it as a traditional
resource among the country people, but in this case it seemed to have
been ordered by a medical practitioner. Perhaps, after all, there may be
something in the strange remedies and strange mixtures of remedies so
often described in old books, and what we now deride may not have been
without its value. If an empirical remedy will cure you, it is of more
use than a scientific composition which ought to cure you but does not.
How much depends on custom! The woman felt a repugnance to skinning the
mice, yet they are the cleanest creatures, living on grain; she would
have skinned a hare or rabbit without hesitation, and have cooked and
eaten bacon, though the pig is not a cleanly feeder. It is a country
remark that the pig's foot - often seen on the table - has as many bones as
there are letters of the alphabet. The grapnel kept at every village
draw-well is called the grabhook; the plant called honesty (because both
sides of the flower are alike) is old woman's penny. If you lived in the
country you might be alarmed late in the evening by hearing the tramp of
feet round your house. But it is not burglars; it is young fellows with a
large net and a lantern after the sparrows in the ivy. They have a
prescriptive right to enter every garden in the village. They cry
'sparrow catchers' at the gate, and people sit still, knowing it is all
right. In the jealous suburb of a city the dwellers in the villas would
shrink from this winter custom, the constable would soon have orders to
stop it; in the country people are not so rigidly exclusive.
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