Until he came to the side.

‘Take hold of my hand, my pretty ladye,

And I will make you my bride.’

’Lie there, lie there, you false-hearted man,

Lie there instead of me,

For six pretty maids hast thou drowned here

And the seventh hath drowned thee.’

So then she mounted the milk-white steed

And led the dapple grey,

And she rode till she came to her own father’s door,

An hour before it was day.

As this last song was piped out in the aged voice, women at their cottage doors on summer evenings would say: “They’ll soon be out now. Poor old Dave’s just singing his ‘Outlandish Knight’.”

Songs and singers all have gone, and in their places the wireless blares out variety and swing music, or informs the company in cultured tones of what is happening in China or Spain. Children no longer listen outside. There are very few who could listen, for the thirty or forty which throve there in those days have dwindled to about half a dozen, and these, happily, have books, wireless, and a good fire in their own homes. But, to one of an older generation, it seems that a faint echo of those songs must still linger round the inn doorway. The singers were rude and untaught and poor beyond modern imagining; but they deserve to be remembered, for they knew the now lost secret of being happy on little.

5

Survivals

There were three distinct types of home in the hamlet. Those of the old couples in comfortable circumstances, those of the married people with growing families, and the few new homes which had recently been established. The old people who were not in comfortable circumstances had no homes at all worth mentioning, for, as soon as they got past work, they had either to go to the workhouse or find accommodation in the already overcrowded cottages of their children. A father or a mother could usually be squeezed in, but there was never room for both, so one child would take one parent and another the other, and even then, as they used to say, there was always the in-law to be dealt with. It was a common thing to hear ageing people say that they hoped God would be pleased to take them before they got past work and became a trouble to anybody.

But the homes of the more fortunate aged were the most comfortable in the hamlet, and one of the most attractive of these was known as “Old Sally’s.” Never as “Old Dick’s,” although Sally’s husband, Dick, might have been seen at any hour of the day, digging and hoeing and watering and planting his garden, as much a part of the landscape as his own row of beehives.