OLD COUNTRY FOLK 223 



And this makes me think of door-scrapers. Throughout 

 the clay weald, at the doors of churches and of houses 

 of all classes, may be found iron door-scrapers of many a 

 good pattern ; while at many cottage doors is a birch 

 scraper, looking like a large birch broom anchored to the 

 ground by having its handle driven through it into the 

 earth. It is a capital scraper and easily made, by first 

 driving in a strong and fairly long stake, and then binding 

 on some stiff birch spray with hazel withes. You hold on 

 to the top of the stake while you scrape off the mud. 



To go back to the old people's words. The great piles 

 of cumulus cloud that are about in thundery weather are 

 called ' thunder-pillars.' 



The letter 'b' is often softened into 'v"; as in 'dis- 

 turve ' for ' disturb,' and ' root fivres ' for ' root fibres.' 



Green vegetables were generically known as ' sauce.' 

 A labourer with a productive garden is said to have ' a 

 nice bit of ground to grow sauce in.' 



An interesting case of phonetic evolution is the country 

 name for the mountain-ash, ' twig-bean.' An old English 

 name for this tree, which grows commonly in the neigh- 

 bourhood, is ' quick-beam ' or ' quicken-beam.' Possibly the 

 transition from beam to bean has come about from the 

 three-year-old suckers being much sought after as bean- 

 poles. Bean-poles remind one of pea-sticks, locally called 

 ' pea-rises,' but generally pronounced ' pea-rices.' 



Junipers, which are wild about the hills, are always 

 ' jinnipers.' 



In the case of a name that presents no particular mean- 

 ing there seems to be a tendency to convert it into some- 

 thing with a sense to it, as in the ' twig-bean.' 



