Page:Early Reminiscences.djvu/191

Now, alas, that is at an end, banished by hay-tossing and hay-raking machinery!

A sound rarely heard now is that of the flail with its rhythmic throb on the thrashing floor. It is now only to be heard when some "reed" is being thrashed for thatching. The grain at this day is driven out of the husks by a steam thrashing machine.

I suppose the plough-boy still sings or whistles when driving his team, but I do not hear him now. It was otherwise formerly; and our folk-songs abound in plough-boy ballads.

A pretty little lay of the plough-boy was sung to me by Samuel Gilbert, who for fifty-two years had been landlord of the Falcon Inn at Mawgan; he was aged eighty-one in 1891. But I got the same song from J. Old at S. Eval, from John Dingle, Coryton, and from R. Hard at South Brent.

"The lark in the morning awakes from her nest,
 She mounts the white air with the dew on her breast.
 O! the lark and the plough-boy together they can sing,
 She returns to her nest in the ev-en-ing.

 One morning she mounted so high and so high
 She lookéd around her, and at the dark sky.
 In the morn she was singing, and this was her lay,
 There's no life like the plough-boy's in the sweet month of May.

 When the day's work is over that he hath to do,
 O! then to a fair or a wake will he go.
 And then will he whistle, and then will he sing,
 And thence to his fair love a ribbon will bring.

 Good luck to the plough-boy, wherever he be,
 He'll take a sweet maiden to sit on his knee.
 He will drink the brown beer, he will whistle and sing,
 O! the plough-boy's more happy than Noble or King."

A curious custom now entirely lost was the "Crying a neck." At harvest time the reapers left one portion to the last.

Mrs. Bray in her Borders of the Tamar and the Tavy, writing to Robert Southey on June 9, 1832, said: "One evening, about the end of harvest, I was riding out on my pony, attended by a servant who was a born and bred Devonian. We were passing near a field on the borders of Dartmoor, where the reapers were