COUNTRY LIFE
IF the production of new local magazines is any evidence, we are witnessing a notable increase of county pride. This is seen not only in, say, Sussex, Yorkshire, Lancashire and Devon, which have always been county-conscious, but in much humbler units. The latest of these is Huntingdon, which boasts a smaller population than any others, Rut- land only excepted ; and has suffered peculiarly, thanks to a clay soil, from rural depopulation. Its new quarterly, published at St. Ives, Huntingdon, at 2S. 6d., is a model and helps to bring out a fact, which I have long noticed, that the greater part of the shire is the home of a singularly rich folk-lore, still recoverable. The smallness and remote- ness of many of the hamlets—of which the famous Little Gidding is a good example—have preserved May Day and Plough Monday celebra- tions and belief in strange remedies (such as a diet of mice in an attack of measles—to quote a memory of my own) and not less strange prejudices. Wonderful work in the preservation of old lore, just at the date when it was disappearing, has been done by a handful of archaeo- logists, such as Mr. Tebbutt (of the clan of skating champions) of St. Neots. It will be lamentable news, both in the county and out of it, that a recently discovered Harmony of Nicholas Ferrar, annotated by Charles the First, has gone to the United States, not to Little Gidding.
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