LINCOLNSHIRE STORIES
- played "on the stones," stalls are set up where one may buy
plants and clothes, and things hard to digest like "bull's eyes," as well as boots and braces, and near "the Statue" at the other end, are farm requisites, sacks, tools, and the delightful-smelling tarred twine, as well as all sorts of old iron, chains, bolts, hinges, etc., which it seems to be worth someone's while to carry from market to market. It is here that the humours of the petty auctioneer are to be heard, and the broad Doric of the Lincolnshire peasant. In the pig market below the church hill you may hear a man trying to sell some pigs, and to the objection that they are "Stränge an' small," he replies, "Mebbe just now; but I tell ye them pigs 'ull be greät 'uns," then, in a pause, comes the voice from a little old woman who is looking on without the least idea of buying, "It 'ull be a straänge long while fust," and in a burst of laughter the chance of selling that lot is snuffed out, or, as they say at the Westmorland dog trials, "blown off."
There is an unconscious humour about the older Lincolnshire peasants which makes it very amusing to be about among them, whether in market, field or home. My father never returned from visiting his parish without some rich instance of dialect or some humorous speech that he had heard. Finding a woman flushed with anger outside her cottage once, and asking her what was amiss, he was told "It's them Hell-cats." "Who do you call by such a name?" "Them Johnsons yonder." "Why? What have they been doing?" "They've been calling me." "That's very wrong; what have they been calling you?" "They've bin calling me Skinny." At another time a woman, in the most cutting tones, alluding to her next-door neighbours who had an afflicted child, said, "We may-be poor, and Wanty [her husband] says we are poor, destitutely poor, and there's no disgraäce in being poor, but our Mary-Ann doant hev fits." Another time, when my sister was recommending a book from the lending library describing a voyage round the world, and called "Chasing the Sun," a little old woman looked at the title and said, "Naäy, I weänt ha' that: I doänt howd wi sich doings. Chaäsing the Sun indeed; the A'mighty will soon let 'em know if they gets a chevying him." In the same village I got into conversation one autumn day with a small freeholder whose cow had been ill, and asked him how he had cured her, he said, "I got haafe a
