lads would pronounce a doggerel rhyme, of which one version is as follows:
"I've come a-shroving,
For a piece of pancake,
Or a piece of bacon.
Or a little truckle cheese
Of your own making.
Give me some or give me none,
Or else your door shall have a stone."
A stone or a shard is kept ready to carry out the threat, but is rarely used, for usually a pancake is given to the singers. Sometimes, in the case of a known niggard, the dole is not waited for, the stone is thrown, and a scutter of scampering feet denotes the hurried decamping of the serenaders.
In some places the parties go round on the night before Shrove Tuesday, and throw a handful of old chloam at the doors at the conclusion of the chanty. The young men in the house, if there chance to be any there, rush out and try to capture one of the raiders. If they do so, they take him indoors, and black his face with soot from the chimney back. Then they give him a pancake and let him go, smutty but happy.
Jan. 17.—Old Twelfth Day Eve.
The conclusion of the Christmas festivities on the twelfth night after Old Christmas was formerly celebrated in many farmhouses by a feast after the style of a harvest supper, and by the singing of quaint old carols sung to the accompaniment of fiddle and bass-viol. This was succeeded by a visit of a good part of the company to the orchards, where a wassail was sung for the good crop of fruit, and a cup of cider thrown over the oldest tree in the orchard as a libation.
Shots were fired into the boughs, from an old blunderbuss by preference, and a loud shout given, when all returned to the farmhouse kitchen, for a drop more "to keep out the cold."
The custom of shooting at the apple trees is still kept up in West Somerset (one need hardly say that the drinking part is
