Now, Sam, ‘ave well where you be gwain,

Whatever others does to sou, be sure don’t turn again.

To which Sam replied:

Yes, very purty, fancy that now, blow me jacket tight!

If they begins their rigs wi’ me, I’ll putty soon show fight,

and cut himself a good stout ash stick before setting out in his ‘holland smock, as good as new’ on foot to ‘Lunnon town’.

To her children’s disgust in after years, Laura’s memory left him, newly arrived, on London Bridge, asking passers-by if they knew “our Sal, or mayhap Squire Brown,” but there were stanzas and stanzas after that—that one song, in fact, accounted for a good part of the evening. But no one then present found it too long, for the younger smiths had slipped, one by one, out of the door, and those left, excepting Laura and Miss Lane, were old and loved the old, slow, country manner of rejoicing.

They sat around the table. Mrs. Beer with her arms folded on her comfortable stomach and one ear always open to catch what she called “a bidding,” for “My dear, ‘tis a mortal truth that babies likes to come arter dark. For why? So’s nobody should see their blessed little spirits come winging;” Beer himself beaming on all and inclined to hiccups towards the end of the evening; the old washerwoman’s worn fingers fingering her muslin cap, only worn on special occasions; Zillah, important and fussy, acting the part of a second hostess; and Matthew, with his old blue eyes shining with gratification at the laughter which greeted his jokes. Miss Lane, very upright at the head of the table in her claret-coloured silk, looked like a visitant from another sphere, well weighted down to earth, though, by her gold chains and watch and brooches and locket; and Laura, in pink print, ran in and out with plates and glasses, because it was Zillah’s evening off. That was the hay-home supper, a survival, though perhaps not more ancient than a couple of hundred years or so—a mere babe of a survival compared to the Village Feast.

The maypole had long been chopped up for firewood, the morris dance was fading out as one after another the old players died, and Plough Monday had become an ordinary working day; but at Candleford Green the Feast was still a general holiday, as it must have been from the day upon which the church was dedicated, far back in the centuries.

Some kind of feast may have been held on the green before that time, some pagan rite, for even in the respectable latter part of the nineteenth century there was more of a pagan than a Christian spirit abroad at the Feast celebrations.