Cock Robin Sings The Louder For The Silence Of Other Birds, And If He Comes To The Farmstead And Pipes Away Day By Day On A Bare Cherry Tree Or Any Bough That Is Near The Door, After His Custom, The Farmer Thinks It An Evil Omen.

For a robin to sing persistently near the house winter or summer is a sign that something is about to go wrong.

Yet the farmer will not shoot him. The roughest poaching fellows who would torture a dog will not kill a robin; it is bad luck to have anything to do with it. Most people like to see fir boughs and holly brought into the house to brighten the dark days with their green, but the cottage children tell you that they must not bring a green fir branch indoors, because as it withers their parents will be taken ill and fade away. Indeed the labouring people seem in all their ways and speech to be different, survivals perhaps of a time when their words and superstitions were the ways of a ruder England. The lanes and the gateways in the fields, as they say, are 'slubby' enough in November, and those who try to go through get 'slubbed' up to their knees. This expresses a soft, plastic, and adhesive condition of the mud which comes on after it has been 'raining hop-poles' for a week. The labourer has little else to do but to chop up disused hop-poles into long fagots with a hand-bill - in other counties a bill-hook. All his class bitterly resent the lowering of wages which takes place in winter; it is a shame, they say, and they evidently think that the farmers ought to be forced to pay them more - they are starvation wages. On the other hand, the farmer, racked in every direction, and unable to sell his produce, finds the labour bill the most difficult to meet, because it comes with unfailing regularity every Saturday. A middle-aged couple of cottagers left their home, and the wife told us how they had walked and walked day after day, but the farmers said they were too poor to give them a job. So at last the man, as they went grumbling on the highway, lost his temper, and hit her a 'clod' in the head, 'and I never spoke to him for an - hour - afterwards; no, that I didn't; not for an hour.' A clod is a heavy, lumping blow. Their home was 'broad' of Hurst - that is, in the Hurst district, but at some little distance.

'There a' sets' is a constant expression for there it lies. A dish on the table, a cat on the hearth, a plough in the field, 'there a' sets,' there it is. 'No bounds' is another. It may rain all day long, 'there's no bounds;' that is, no knowing. 'I may go to fair, no bounds,' it is uncertain, I have not made up my mind.

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