Traditions. 75 



of wood, which, of course, would not ignite the 

 powder, and thus they were beaten. Of date, place, 

 or persons he had no knowledge. He 'niinded' a 

 great snowfall when he was a boy, and helping to 

 drag the coaches out and making a firm road for 

 them with hurdles. Once while grubbing a hedge 

 near the road he found five shillings' worth of pen- 

 nies — the great old ' coppers ' — doubtless hidden 

 by a thief. He could not buy so much with one of 

 the new sort of coppers : liked them as King George 

 made best. 



An old lady of about seventy, living at the village 

 inn, a very brisk bod}', seemed quite unable to un- 

 derstand what was meant by history, but could tell 

 me a story if I liked. The story was a rambling 

 narrative of an amour in some foreign country. 

 The lady, to conceal a meeting with her paramour, 

 which took place in the presence of her son, who 

 was an imbecile (or, in her own words, had ' no 

 more sense than God gave him,' a common country 

 expression for a fool), went upstairs and rained 

 raisins on him from the window. The son told the 

 husband what had happened ; but, asked to specify 

 the time, could only fix it by, ' When it rained 

 raisins.' This was supposed to be merely a fresh 

 proof of his imbecility, and the lady escaped. 



In this imperfect narrative is there not a distorted 

 version of a chapter in the ' Pentameron ' ? But how 

 did it get into the mind of an illiterate old woman in 

 an out-of-the-wa}^ village ? Nothing j^et of Waterloo, 

 Culloden, Sedgmoor, or the civil war ; but in the end 

 an old man declared that King Charles had once 

 slept in an old house just about to be pulled down. 



