mocksing noon-naw,' so she was not sorry to leave him. The
phrase might be translated, 'great loose-jointed idiot.'

They sometimes had lettuce-pudding for dinner, and thought nothing of
eating raw bacon. In the snow the men wound hay-bands round their legs
to serve as gaiters, and found it answered admirably. One poor girl
had been subject to fits ever since a stupid fellow, during the
haymaking, jokingly picked up a snake and threw it round her neck. Yet
even in that far-away coombe-bottom they knew enough to put an
oyster-shell in the kettle to prevent incrustation.

The rules of pronunciation understood about Okebourne seemed to
consist in lengthening the syllables that are usually spoken quick,
and shortening those that are usually long. Hilary said that years ago
it really appeared as if there was something deficient in the organs
of the throat among the labourers, for there were words they
positively could not pronounce. The word 'reservoir,' for instance,
was always 'tezzievoy;' they could not speak the word correctly. He
could not explain to me a very common expression among the men when
they wished to describe anything unusual or strange for which they had
no exact equivalent. It was always 'a sort of a meejick.' By degrees,
however, we traced it back to 'menagerie.' The travelling shows of
wild beasts at first so much astonished the villagers that everything
odd and curious became a menagerie, afterwards corrupted to 'meejick.'

'Caddle no man's cattle' was a favourite proverb with a population who
were never in a hurry. 'Like shot out of a show'l,' to express extreme
nimbleness, was another. A comfortless, bare apartment was 'gabern;'
anything stirred with a pointed instrument was 'ucked'--whether a cow
'ucked' the fogger with her horn or the stable was cleaned out with
the fork. The verb 'to uck' was capable indeed of infinite
conjugation, and young Aaron, breaking off a bennet, once asked me to
kindly 'uck' a grain of hay-dust out of his eye with it. When a heron
rose out of the brook 'a moll ern flod away.'

With all their apparent simplicity some of the cottage folk were quite
up to the value of appearances. Old Aaron had a little shop; he and
his wife sold small packets of tea, tobacco, whipcord, and so forth.
Sometimes while his wife was weighing out the sugar, old
Aaron--wretched old deceiver--would come in rustling a crumpled piece
of paper as if it were a banknote, and handing it to her with much