MORE STORIES pound o' sulphur and mixed it wi' warm watter and bottled it into her. Eh! it's a fine thing I reckon is sulphur for owt that's badly, cow or pig or the missis or anythink." Then, with a serious look he went on, "There's a straänge thing happened wi' beans, Mr. Rownsley." "What's that?" "Why, the beans is turned i' the swad" (= pod). "No!" "Yees they hev." "How do you mean?" "Why they used to be black ends uppermost and now they'r 'tother waay on." "Well, that's just how they always have been." "Naay they warn't. It was 81 they turned." They do lie with the attachment of each bean to the pod, just the way you would not expect, and having noticed this he was convinced that up to then they had really lain the way he had always supposed they did, so difficult is it to separate fact from imagination. The similes used by a Lincolnshire native are often quite Homeric, as when an old fellow, who was cutting his crop of beans, the haulm of which is notoriously tough, resting on his scythe said, "I'd rayther plow wi two dogs nor haulm beans." Then they have often a quiet, slow way of saying things, which is in itself humorous. I remember a labourer who was very deaf, but he had been much annoyed by the mother of a man whose place he had succeeded to. He was working alongside of his master and apropos of nothing but his own thoughts, he said, "Scriptur saäys we should forgive one another; but I doänt knoä. If yon owd 'ooman fell i' the dyke I doänt think I should pull her out. I mowt tell some 'un on her, but I doänt think I should pull her out howiver." There is some kindliness in that, though in quantity it is rather like the Irishman's news: "I've come to tell you that I have nothing to tell you, and there's some news in that." But the Lincolnshire native is a trifle stern; even the mother's hand is more apt to be punitive than caressing. "I'll leather you well when I gets you home, my lad," I have heard a mother say to a very small boy, and I have heard tell of a mother who, when informed that her little girl had fallen down the well, angrily exclaimed, "Drat the children, they're allus i' mischief; and now she's bin and drownded hersen I suppose."
In Westmorland it is the husband who will take too much at market on whom the vials of the wrath of the missis are outpoured, and they generally know how to "sarve" him. One good lady, on being asked "However did you get him ower
