SOME PAROCHIAL STORIES.
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—One morning I heard that a farm labourer's wife who lived in a very lonely part of the Blackdown Hills, between Somerset and Devon, had just received the gift of a baby. My wife at once made gruel, &c., which I took up to the cottage. Upon arrival I knocked at the door, which, to my surprise, was opened by the lady of the house. " Oh I Mrs. Dropper,". -I said, " I must have heard a false report. I was told that you had a baby this morning I " " So I have, sir. Would yoy like to see it ? 7 " But you ought to be in bed ! " " Whit I Go to bed for a baby ? Then who'd look after the kiddies, and get my man his dinner ? ' " But didn't you have
a doctor ? " " Yes, sir. Doctor has just ridden off. He jumped off his horse and opened the door, and said, ' Is it a ploughboy or a dairymaid ? ' So I paid him his guinea, and he was soon gone."
Upon an old tombstone in Street Churchyard was the text, " The Lord hath no pleasure in the strength of a horse, neither delighteth He in any man's legs." After some years of wonderment, I learned from an old inhabitant that the deceased had been savagely attacked by a horse which had broken the man's legs so badly that he died of the wounds. The aptness of the quotation was at last made clear !
A footman had died in a large country house. The lady's maid was detailing subsequent happenings. She closed the narrative with the statement : " So we put I.H.S. over his coffin. For if anyone could say I have suffered ' he could."
Sam Jarvis, a Somerset veteran, when visited by me, stated that in the doctor's words his trouble was " all in yer ole jaw." Thus was the doctor's neuralgia ' interpreted by the sufferer " Very coarse veins " is a frequent interpretation of varicose
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