A LECTURE on learning. Astuteness below stairs. A gentleman’s opinion
on servants. A horse milliner. Intimacy with Catty. More suspicion of
“delicate attentions,” which so far are not quite so criminal as the
squire’s.
Perhaps our modern governesses who possess the vain accomplishment of
reading and writing, may feel disposed to undervalue the acquirements of
our rural Welsh governess. But let them not triumph; and be it
recollected that tastes differ, and that many of our living patricians,
as well as wealthy plebeians, who are considered the great, the mighty,
and the respectable of the land, deprecate with becoming vehemence the
prevailing mania for educating the poor. We have heard ladies, and great
ones too, attired in silks and velvets, pall and purple, and “faring
sumptuously every day,” declare most positively that they never knew a
servant good for anything that could read and write.
No sooner were they capable of wielding a goose quill, than the impudent
hussies presumed to have a will of their own, and their opinions mounted
a step nearer to the attitude of their mistresses. And on men, they
said, education had a worse effect, as thereby they became the idle
readers of books and newspapers, which made them saucy to their
superiors, and sometimes the most villanous cut-throat radicals. Now it
will be readily admitted, we should think, that there was little danger
of Catty’s scholars ever becoming such pernicious characters; and
therefore, let not liberal envy withhold from her the well-merited meed
of applause. Alas for the good old times—we see no such
school-mistresses now-a-days! those days of the golden age of simplicity
are gone for ever.
Perhaps we might wonder that the parents of the children, those who paid
such a round sum every week for instruction administered to those “babes
and sucklings,” did not grumble at the slow pace at which the process
went on. But to criticise a subject properly, we must be “well up” in
it, and the villagers of Tregaron were not exactly calculated to measure
the amount of “book larning” their babes did, or did not acquire. They
were satisfied if their children were “out of the way, the livelong day”
and a penny per week was surely not so high a price to pay for that
luxury.
Although our hero’s mother could not be called a woman of letters, she
certainly possessed qualities more original than generally fell to the
lot of persons in her station. At carding wool or spinning it, knitting
stockings or mittens, the most envious admitted her superiority to every
woman in Tregaron.
She moreover had gained no small consideration in another character,
which her jealous neighbours satirically denominated a hedge milliner,
whose province it was to mend hedging gloves and coarse frocks for
ploughmen, to darn or patch with leather the heels of their stout woollen
stockings, and also to repair horse collars at half the price charged by
old Daff the saddler; the latter part of her occupation, which required a
delicate hand to cut the slender sewing thongs from the raw bull hides,
caused her to be called a horse milliner, which, after all, was not much
more applicable than if she had been called a bull tailor. This
malignant waggery, however, was unable to disturb the tranquil soul of
Catty; she loved horses, and in her juvenile days had often whiled away
her mornings and evenings in the rural pastime of driving them, both in
plough and harrow, while carolling some rural ditty, till the rocks and
mountains echoed with the cadence of her harmony.
Catty, with such capabilities and accomplishments, was of course an
object of wonder, awe, and admiration, to many of the swains of Tregaron,
notwithstanding those “delicate attentions” bestowed upon her by Sir Jno.
Wynn, bart., but the success of her original method of tuition made her
quite independent of their protestations. But, altering the sex in the
quotation, we may say that, “There is a tide in the affairs of women;”
and it proved to be so in Catty’s case.
The right man came at last. Like all her amiable sex, she professed the
utmost abhorrence of mercenary motives in marriage, though many
insinuated that she knew the value of property from having never
possessed any worth mentioning. It was observed that she treated with
indifference, if not aversion, those unprofitable lovers who had nothing
but their goodly persons to recommend them.
Certain innuendoes were even thrown out respecting a suspicion of her
coquettings with one of the most ugly, miserly, and repulsive of
clowns;—one who was not only a clown, but a red-haired one;—not only
knock-kneed, but squint-eyed;—not only squint-eyed, but a woman-hater;
and worse than all, a foreigner!—being a native of a distant part of the
adjoining county of Carmarthen, and known only by the nick-name of Jack
of Sheer Gâr, or Carmarthenshire Jack.
This person was repulsive in the extreme. Clad in old, patched, dirty
clothes, with such peculiar facial properties as we have before
enumerated, he was apparently the last man upon whom one of the opposite
sex would have cast her favouring eye. He was at this time chief
husbandman and bailiff to the squire, an office which, giving him power
over other servants, we may be very sure did not increase his popularity.
But few showed their distaste and aversion openly; it would have been a
dangerous experiment with Jack of Sheer Gâr.
The standing jest against him was, his qualifications as a trencherman,
and his reputation as a “huge feeder” was certainly unrivalled. As there
was not a single pastime under the head of amusement, that the ingenuity
of man has ever devised for the entertainment of his fellows, save
eating, that possessed a charm for him, it might of course be expected
that this solitary recreation would be indulged in the proportion that he
excluded all others. He not only performed all the functions of the
gross glutton, but as the actors say, “looked the character,” to
perfection.
The reader, measuring him by other men, would make a very erroneous guess
on the most prominent feature of his face, if he fixed on the nasal
protuberance—no such thing—his nose was flat and small, but his large
projecting upper teeth, like “rocks of pearl jutting over the sea,” were
ever bared for action, white as those of his only companion, the mastiff,
and nobly independent of a sheathing lip.
Others more comely features might wear
But Jack was famed for his white teeth bare.
As the squire’s lady was not the most liberal in supplying the servants’
table, those wags, male or female, who were in the habit of committing
the silent mimicry against Jack, were soon taught a severe lesson at the
expense of their bowels. It was discovered that, whenever enraged at
their treatment, instead of spending his breath in vain reproaches, or
taking to the more violent proceeding of fisty-cuffs, Jack revenged
himself by eating most outrageously, so that scoffers, deprived of their
shares, often found their stomachs minus. His power of mastication
increased with his anger; and the flaming energy that was mentally
inciting him to give an enemy a fierce facer, or a destructive
cross-buttock, was diverted from his knuckles to his teeth; and in every
quantum which he ground in his relentless mill, he felt the glowing
satisfaction of having annihilated a foe.
Woe to those who were his next neighbours at table, and sat so close to
his elbows at those hours of excitement; fierce punches in the ribs, as
if by accident, were among the slightest consequences; and those who were
thus taught the manners to keep a respectable distance, declared that the
fears they entertained was only of his knife. But his bloodthirsty
propensities were not so great as they were represented to be. Jack
believed in the “power of the eye,” and exemplified it, in his own case,
by making that organ express what his head never meant to carry out. The
squire knew his value as a faithful servant, and turned a deaf ear to all
the evil that was reported of him.
Before fanaticism had cast its puritanic gloom over Wales, and identified
itself almost with the Welsh in character, mirth and minstrelsy, dance
and song, emulative games and rural pastimes were the order of the day;
and, as the people worked hard all the week, it must be confessed that
these sports often infringed upon the sanctity of the Sabbath.
Sundays were often entirely spent in dancing, wrestling, and kicking the
foot-ball. The latter violent exercise, at this time prevalent in
Cardiganshire, was performed in large parties of village against village,
and parish against parish, when the country brought together its mass of
population either to partake in the glories of the game or to enjoy the
success of their friends, as spectators. On these occasions Carmarthen
Jack loved to be present, but only as a spectator, as he was never known
to take a part in the game.
Jack thought the exercise of play was waste of time and breath. He told
others that he “kept his breath to cool his flummery, and his strength to
make money.” Whilst the others were panting with efforts made in the
game, Jack was quietly cutting and carving his wooden spoons, made out of
the birch or alder which he stored all the week under his bed, for the
purpose of drying it.
At fairs also, Carmarthen Jack would be equally punctual, and after
having done his master’s business of buying or selling a horse or so,
would be seen with a load of merchandise of his own manufacture, wooden
spoons, ladles, and clog soles, in abundance, which drew about him all
the rural house-keepers far and near. “No milliner could suit her
customers with gloves” in greater variety than Jack with spoons to please
his purchasers. He had spoons for man, woman and child, fashioned for
every sort of mouth, from the tiny infant’s to the shark-jaws of the
hungry ploughman, which, like his own, was said to present a gap from ear
to ear. He had spoons for use, and spoons for ornament; the latter,
meant to keep company with the showy polished pewter, were made of box or
yew, highly polished and curiously carved with divers characters,
supposed to be suns, moons, stars, hearts transfixed with the dart of
cupid, and sometimes a hen and chickens; with hieroglyphics for fear of
their being mistaken for a cat and mice, with other such
misconstructions, Jack always explained at the time of bargaining,
without any extra charge.
Nothing could more emphatically prove the excellency of Jack’s wares,
than the circumstance of his being personally unpopular among the women,
and yet his wares in the highest esteem. The frowns of the fair, which
threw a gloom on the sunshine of his days, may be traced to a source not
at all dishonourable to him. The girls at the squire’s had played him so
many tricks, that once in the height of aggravation, Jack waged war
against the whole sex, devoting to the infernal gods every creature that
wore a petticoat, and vowing, from that day forward, not one of the
proscribed race should ever enter his room, which was romantically
situated over the stable, its wickered lattice commanding a full view of
both the pigsty and the dunghill.
The consequence of this terrible row caused him, at first, some trouble,
as, to keep it, he was obliged thenceforward to be his own chambermaid,
laundress, and sempstress, offices that accorded ill with his previous
habits. The laudable firmness of his nature, however, soon overcame
these petty difficulties; and so far was he from backsliding from his
previous determination, that he vowed to throw through the window the
first woman who entered his chamber, which the satirical hussies called
his den—a threat which effectually secured him from further intrusion.
Sometimes, indeed, while sitting at the door of the cow-house, or the
stable, listening to the rural sounds of the cackling geese and grunting
pigs, and darning his hose, or patching his leather breeches, or treading
his shift in the brook by way of washing it, those eternal plagues of
his, the girls, would be seen and heard behind the covert of a wall or
hedge, smothering their tittering, which at last would burst out, in
spite of suppression, into a loud horse-laugh, when, one and all, they
would take to their heels, while Jack amused himself by pelting their
rear, in their precipitate retreat, with clods of earth, small stones or
anything that came in his way.
“Circumstances alter cases.” In time Jack gained the reputation of being
rich. He had made spoons to some purpose, and however the fair sex may
cry up their disinterestedness, we are all aware that money materially
alters the position of a man in their eyes. One of the maids with this
knowledge, became very suddenly enamoured of him, and tried to gain his
good will. But having one day ventured to Jack’s “sanctum,” the wench
was pitched into the dunghill below, and as a consequence the “pangs of
despised love” raged in her bosom. The first act of her resentment was
to spread about the insidious report that Jack Sheer was a woman-hater—an
insinuation that rather preyed upon his mind, as he dreaded the effect
such an unmerited stigma would have upon his private trade. But
innocence is ever predestined to an ultimate triumph; and an event soon
happened that proved the falsehood of those prevalent tales to his
discredit, and convinced his greatest foes that he possessed a heart, if
not overflowing with human charity, at least penetrable to the
blandishments of beauty, and quick with sensibility to female merit.
On one auspicious market-day, Carmarthen Jack appeared in the streets of
Tregaron where the market is held, loaded with his usual merchandise,
which he spread on the ground, and sat beside them; but not meeting with
a ready sale, and disdaining even momentary idleness, began with
earnestness to cut and scoop away at a piece of alder, gradually forming
it into a huge ladle, to correspond with the largest size three-legged
iron pot. On this eventful morning Catty had occasion to perambulate the
fair, to purchase a new ladle, her cross-grained sister having broken the
old one, by thumping with it on the back of an overgrown hog, whose
foraging propensities had led him to investigate the recesses of the
schoolroom.
The notoriety occasioned by Jack’s peculiarities, and the fact of his
having money, reached the ears of Catty, and our prudent tutor determined
to make his acquaintance through the medium of the broken ladle. Some
people say that Catty broke the ladle herself, broke it with a design and
that design was an excuse for visiting and conquering one who hated all
her sex. Be that as it may, she sought and found him in the fair, and
fell in love with him and his ladle at the same instant. After an effort
to conquer her native bashfulness, and to look as lovely as possible, she
accosted him with such uncommon civility as utterly astounded the poor
clownish misanthropic bachelor. She examined the ladle in his hand, and
though not half finished, declared it to be the handsomest ever her eyes
beheld, and paid for it without seeking the least abatement in the price.
Jack gaped at her, with open mouth and staring eyes, and thought her a
very interesting woman, though his first impression was, that she was
mad, as he had asked double the selling price, on purpose to abate one
half, according to the custom immemorial in Welsh dealings.
She next purchased half a dozen common birch-wood spoons, and, as many
ornamental ones made of box, to adorn her shelf, and, as before paid him
his own price. Jack thought her very lovely indeed: and when she made
another purchase of a pair of clog soles, quite irresistible!—her ready
money opened his heart as the best key in the world would have done a
patent lock; and he was almost ready to offer them as a present, but for
fear of wounding her delicacy. As she found he had no further variety,
she ordered half a dozen more common spoons, and Jack, with all the
amiability that he could possibly throw into his hard features, presented
her with one of his most finished articles in box. She received it with
that peculiar smile with which a lady accepts a welcome love-token, and
replied in the softest tone imaginable, “Indeed I will keep it for your
sake, John bach!”
Jack had nothing to do but wonder—he never had been called John in his
life before; at any other time he would have thought she mocked him—and
the endearing term of “bach” too, was equally new to his ears, which
seemed to grow longer as they tingled with the grateful sound. This
interesting scene was closed by Catty asking him to her house to partake
of a dinner of flummery and milk, which he accepted with the best grace
imaginable, and trudged off with his wares on his back and dangling from
his arms and button-holes; and thus gallanting her in the most amatory
style; he walked by her side to Llidiard-y-Fynon.
Unaccustomed to kindness in either word or deed, poor Jack of Sheer Gâr,
met her condescensions and advances with a sheepish sort of gratitude. A
cordial invitation on the part of Catty to repeat his visit as soon, and
as often, as possible, affected him almost to tears; and as a proof of
his unbounded confidence, he left in her care his whole stock of
ready-made spoons and ladles, and almost blubbered when he shook her hand
at parting.
As a proof of the beneficial effect of kindness on a churlish nature, and
the contrary, of ridicule and persecution, we need but contrast this
rugged man’s previous character and conduct with what followed, after the
tenderness of Catty had melted the frost of misanthropy which formed a
crusty coat round his heart. The adventure of the day produced a most
extraordinary revolution in his habits. None of the servants of the
hall, male or female, could conceive what it portended, when Jack asked
one of them, his fellow husbandman, to trim his hair; and while the
fellow clipped his rough red locks with his sheep-shears, once
mischievously pinching his ear with them till he roared, he was surprised
at his questions about the price of a new pair of leather breeches, and a
red neck-cloth. Greater still was the astonishment of the whole house,
when, in a few days after, he appeared changed into a complete rustic
buck in those very articles of dress, and while he thought nobody saw
him, endeavoured to cut a dancing caper on the green, which they mistook
for a frisky bullock. Changes like these are seldom without a reason,
thought his fellow servants; and when they saw Jack’s elated steps lead
him towards Catty’s house, they jeered, and laughed, and winked; and
nothing knew of course, although their knowledge made him all the worse.
Tregaron and its neighbourhood had now food for gossip, and gossip to
some people is indeed the very acme of human felicity.
Flummery and milk, named here as the food on which those lovers regaled,
has been considered in Wales a very popular mess, common, but still a
favourite among high and low, and might be seen on the board of the lord
lieutenant of county, as well as on that of the humblest cottager. The
lofty of the land whose pampered stomachs have turned with loathing from
more dainty dishes in sultry seasons, have welcomed the simplicity of
milk and flummery, as the advocate of native charms would greet the
smilings of a rustic beauty, while the meretricious fair of fashion would
be passed by, neglected.
The English reader will not be offended if I dilate a little praise of my
favourite bowl or platter, (too much to call it a dish perhaps,) while I
explain its nature; and if he be a bloated son of affluence, overflowing
with bile and spleen, he will thank us, after adopting our recommendation
of feeding on it often during his rustication among our mountains. Our
candid sages of the pill and potion, also recommend it as very effective
in promoting an increase of good clear healthy blood.
Flummery is made of the inner hulls of ground oats, when sifted from the
meal, some of which still adheres to it, by soaking it in water till it
acquires a slight taste of acidity, when it is strained through a hair
sieve and boiled till it becomes a perfect jelly. When poured from that
prince of culinary vessels, the large three-legged iron pot, into a vast
earthen dish, it presents a smooth smiling aspect of the most winning
equanimity, till destroyed by the numerous invading spoons of the
company, who plunge a portion of it, scalding hot, into their bowls of
cool milk. Thus much of the descriptive history is given, to illustrate
the following ode to its immortal praise, with which we shall now close
this long chapter.
MILK AND FLUMMERY.
Let luxury’s imbecile train,
Of appetites fastidious,
Each sauced provocative obtain,
The draught or viand perfidious;
But oh! give me that simple food,
Lov’d by the sons of Cymru.
With health, with nourishment imbued,
The sweet cool milk and flummery.
Let pudding-headed English folk
With boast of roast-beef fag us;
Let Scottish Burns crack rural jokes,
And vaunt kail-brose and haggis;
But Cymrian sons, of mount and plain,
From Brecknock to Montgomery,
Let us the honest praise maintain,
Of sweet cold milk and flummery.
On sultry days when appetites
Wane dull, and low, and queasy,
When loathing stomachs nought delights,
To gulph our flummery’s easy.
Dear oaten jelly, pride of Wales!
Thou smooth-faced child of Cymry.
On the ruddy swain regales,
And blesses milk and flummery.
’Tis sweet to stroll on Cambrian heights
O’er-looking vales and rivers.
Where thin and purest air invites,
The soul from spleen delivers;
That foe of bile the light repast
To bloated gout may come wry.
But Nature’s child, thy mid-day fast
Break thou with milk and flummery.