84 Wild Life cn a Southern County. 
he found five shillings’ worth of pennies—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 body, seemed quite unable to under- 
stand 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 hap- 
pened ; 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-way village? Nothing yet 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. 
But then ‘King Charles’ slept, according to local 
tradition, in most of the old houses in the country. 
However, I resolved to visit the place. 
