their liberal allowance-some one was deputed to call upon the Rector for a song. The song was invariably the same, and was called "The Tithe Pig." It seems to have been a long song, but I have never been able to find out what the story was. When it was ended, with vociferous applause every man rose to his feet, and the Rector, tossing a guinea upon the table, retired from the assembly of roisterers, leaving them to spend the guinea as they pleased under another chairman. "He wasn't half a bad little gentleman wasn't Mr. Aufrere, and he and the lady would do a kindness to any one-that they would. Preach? I don't recollect as any one made much o' the preaching in those days. We mostly did w'rout it."

Did the people attend the church? The impression left upon me by all that I can pick up from tradition is that, at least as far down as the first forty years of the century, everybody attended the parish church on Sunday mornings. Afternoon services appear to have been rare and evening services were unheard of. Working in their little gardens on Sunday afternoons appears to have been the universal practice; partly because the laborers' hours were much longer then than now, and partly because on Sunday afternoons the men had nothing else to do but dig in their little allotments.

Scarning had a Sunday school many years before those valuable institutions were generally adopted in England. Here it seems to have grown out of what we should now call an infant school, which was started by the Rector's wife and Mrs. Girling about 1810.

"My grandmother used to keep a school for the little uns as was too young to go to the free school. And grandmother used to teach 'em right well! She was a wonderful good scholar. Mrs. Aufrere used to pay for them, and Mrs. Girling she used to give 'em straw bonnets with a bit of

ribbon round 'em and little shawls to keep 'em warm and make 'em all look alike, and very pretty they looked, too, when they came to church-for they all had to go to church, you know!" But even then it is significant that there were, at least, two opposition dame schools going on at the same time within a mile or so of the first. One of these was started about eighty years ago by a Mrs. Skayce, just outside the bounds of our parish. She, too, "was a wonderful great scholar," and she taught her small pupils not only their letters, but reading and writing and other polite arts. Mrs. Skayce was, I gather, a very rigid and terrible old lady. She charged twopence a week for every child. She was a very strict and uncompromising dissenter, and she made it a condition that every one of the little mites, from three to six years old, should accompany her to the Dissenting chapel at Dereham every Sunday morning, walking two and two, hand in hand. Think of that procession of little toddlers marching solemnly along those two miles of dirty road, with Mrs. Skayce and a neighbor or two like-minded with herself bringing up the rear, and marching home another two miles when the ceremony ended with "a little prayer"!

"How many of them were there?" "Mostly about thirty of us. You remember, don't you, John?"

"O' course I do! We stretched a goodish way across Dereham marketplace. Some on us used to carry the little ones for a bit when they was tired. But when we got near to Dereham old mother Skayce used to say, 'Git on, children!-git on! Two and two-two and two!' and sometimes the. gentlefolks would stop and take notice of us, but old mother Skayce wouldn't put up with it. She fared as if she was a-defying the gentlefolks with her stern 'two and two, children-two and two!'"

The youngest of the interlocutors in this little dialogue is just eighty.

a

Our ancient hostel, the Black Horse, which is now as well conducted roadside inn as well could be, has had a good character, I think, for some fifty or sixty years. But in the first twenty years of the century it was famous for the continual pugilistic encounters that were going on then. The old stories are almost incredible. One old woman assured me that she had known-and my impression is she told me she had seen-"as many as five couples mauling one another" in a single week.

Occasionally these fights were carried on with the most brutal ferocity, and kicking was very frequently part of the game. I have often suspected that the dreadful cases of bad legs, which were so much more common formerly among the old men than they are now, were the results of kicks on the shins given freely in the old days. Some men seem to have had quite a horrible liking for this "sport." "Why, old X. who was dead afore you came, sir. He'd fight for a tater. But he found his master at last! There was a stranger came in one night; nobody knew who he was; and he sat down and said nothing, and they looked at him and some one said as he looked like a powerful strong sort of man, though he wasn't so very tall neither-and X. he got near him and pickt a quarrel with him. And no one knowed how it began; but before they could get into the yard that travelling-man was too quick for X., and he gripped him in his arms and flung him over the table where they was drinking, and he a'most broke his back. He never was a man no more. And while they was picking him up that stranger made off and no one knew what became of him, and no one asked, as I ever heard. But X. was a cripple for the rest of his life. Lost the use of his legs, I mean. But it took him all

ten years, though, for him to die of his hurt."

There is something not only sad and horrible about this kind of thing, but something even disgusting and revolting in the hideous callousness that followed upon familiarity with all these fierce encounters. Happily they have all passed away from among us during the last sixty or seventy years. And no wise man can be other than thankful that it is so.

But while the fear of the law has done its work in making our people incomparably more respectable and orderly than their sires, they have lost something, too. They have lost all that spontaneity which, while it led now and then to a great deal of mischief and practical joking, yet gave scope to the development of eccentricities of character and to the free play of such rollicking fun and riotous mirth as were the natural outcome of mere high spirits. Many of our elders had a few old songs which they sang over and over again at the rough merry-makings and harvest suppers. Old Harry Judd had a very favorite song entitled "The Blues," which the old folks are never tired of talking of. When he was long past seventy it was a sight to see the roguish twinkle of his sly old eyes when you mentioned his famous song. But for all my trying I never could get him to sing it to me-not a verse of it! He went so far as to chuckle at the mention of his vocal powers. But he had got ashamed of it, too; though from all I have heard, there was nothing to be ashamed of in his song. Only the time for singing had passed away, and it is and must be hard to sing with real effect a roaring old ballad in cold blood to an audience of one, and that one the parson.

Dancing has almost become a dead art in our Norfolk villages, and I do not hesitate to say that this has been a loss and not a gain among the people.

On the occasion of the Queen's Jubilee in 1887, some one I forget who-insisted on our having a dance in the meadow where the feasting was carried on. Only two oldish women and the son of one of them could be prevailed on to show off. But the figures and the turn-abouts and the Terpsichorean "fandangles," which they went through, were wonderful to see, and as they warmed up to their work the dear old women seemed to throw themselves back into the merry days of their youth and to forget the years that had passed since hornpipes and reels and rough minuets were the fashion.

As matters stand now among our country folk everybody is like everybody else, and everything that approaches eccentricity of character is frowned upon as something not quite proper. The tremendous forces of repression which have been steadily at work for the last sixty or seventy years have reduced the pleasures of the countryfolk to a minimum, and banished from our midst those more or less harmless diversions-from skittles upwards-which gave some outlet for the exuberant vitality of their grandfathers. As one growled out to me in his indignation at not being allowed to make a short cut across the railroad on his way home from his work: "You mayn't do this, and you mayn't do that, and you mayn't do the other now; till you don't know what you may do. Them ten commandments was bad enough, but there was only ten on 'em. Who's a-going to say what you may do now? Lawk a mussy! they won't let you die quiet in your bed soon, w'rout calling in the parish doctor to say whether your time's come! Why, they'd a shut up old Bright Trollop in the asylum if he'd been alive now. They'd ha' said he wasn't fit to take care of his-self, that they would!"

I pricked up my ears.
"Who was Bright Trollop?"

"Oh, I don't know. You must go to Betsy Upton. She'll tell you all about him."

So to Betsy Upton I repaired, and a highly interesting account she gave me of Bright Trollop, which I hope my readers will forgive me for introducing in this connection.

"Who was Bright Trollop, Betsy?" "Who? He was my great-grandfather, and you may see his stone in the churchyard. You've heard talk of "Trollop's Folly'-you must ha' done!"

On my expressing my absolute ignorance of Mr. Bright Trollop and of his sayings or doings, I was favored with the following story.

Before I tell it, however, I must needs express my belief that Charles Dickens can hardly have been ignorant of some of the talk about Trollop's eccentricities when he described the "Castle" in "Great Expectations," which Wemmick had constructed for himself with his own hands at Walworth.

Probably Dickens heard the gossip about our Scarning mansion in one of his East Anglian pilgrimages. Be that as it may. The following is a narrative of facts.

Brightmore Trollop began life as a carver in wood, during the first half of the eighteenth century, and attained such fame for his skill that he managed to scrape together quite a little fortune. "There used to be lots o' things as Bright Trollop carved in the gentlefolks' houses at one time. I've heerd my mother talk of 'em often-sich as chairs and great bedsteads. There was one beautiful great carved bedstead as I remember when I was a little girl, but I can't tell what came of it."

Having made his pile, Bright Trollop gave up his carving and settled in Skeorn's Inga, about the year 1750, taking a farm of about a hundred acres, with a farmhouse that is all but the

most picturesque little dwelling in the parish to this day. He took it into his head to lay out a garden, not on his own farm but about a quarter of a mile off; and I suspect he must have bought the little patch of ground from one of the small owners, of whom there were so many in those days. The farming business did not give sufficient employment to his active mind, and he spent all his spare time upon his garden. In process of time he had surrounded his little freehold [?] with a very thick hedge "such as no one couldn't see through," and being a very ingenious personage he contrived a kind of labyrinth "and gravel walks going all sorts of ways;" and he dug what he'd call a lake "that wasn't no better nor a pit." "Yes it were! That were a pond! I've often heerd tell of the pond. That weren't no pit. Why, that weren't no more nor a yard deep, and folks said as he puddled it wi' clay his-self."

...

The subtle distinction between a pond and a pit must be left. "Bright, he'd used to call it his lake. Why, they was always a-talking of Trollop's Folly when we was young." In the midst of this earthly Paradise there was a little round house which Mr. Trollop had built with his own hands. It had a door and a window and was full of "all sorts of curious things as Bright had got together, and that got to be so heavy at last that when he was an old man he couldn't move it as he used."

park of his, he acquired a very wide renown. People used to come for miles to pay Mr. Trollop a visit. "The gentle folk they was proud of him, I've heerd say, and they'd do anything for old Bright, as they called him." Sometimes the old man, when he saw them coming, would give his house a turn. Lo! There was no door and no window to be seen, for "there was a kind of a wooden wall, as you may say, that fitted all round that inside chamberlike a great overcoat of boards, as you may say." The would-be visitors, after knocking at the overcoat for a while, would be greeted by the voice of old Bright bidding them to go round to the door, which they never found until he was pleased to give his revolving house a turn, then the door came into sight, and old Bright stood looking out of the window laughing at the gentlefolks. Mr. Trollop prided himself greatly upon his gooseberries and his apples. There never were such gooseberries. when a dish of these giants was brought upon the table it was as likely as not to disappear suddenly. one could imagine. Also there were occasions when the palace smelt very strong, indeed, of apples, and Bright would assure his callers that there were sacks of them, and any one who could find them should have the very best of them to take away. Of course nobody ever did find them till Bright showed them how. That was part of the game. One device of the old man he was exquisitely pleased with putting in practice. A visitor would declare that it was time to go home now. Then there came a creaking sound "of that there swivel." The party rose to go. They opened the door-the only door-and to their horror they found themselves facing the

no

But

How,

mechanism which Trollop invented, however, was in some way concealed from view by the screen which the overcoat afforded.

"lake," whose wide expanse and fathomless depth appalled them. They were actually at its very edge. "Oh! Mr. Trollop, we can't get out that way. It is the wrong door. What shall we do?" etc., etc. Whereupon the creaking "of that there swivel" began again; and the gentlefolks departed, having by some other miraculous process been provided with an apple a-piece and in high spirits at their escape from the uncanny devices of the wizard and all the perils of The Folly.

"Ah! But that was a wonderful place! I've heerd the old people tell all sorts of wonderful stories about Trollop's Folly. And that was a rare pity as that wasn't kept up. But you see as the last of they Trollops, he went on bad and he had to go. It was just as old Bright kind o' prophesied, for he'd carved in big letters on The Folly

When I'm dead and come no more
This place will be as 'twas afore.

Brightmore Trollop died on the 27th of March, and was buried on the 30th of March, 1802. He is described in the The Nineteenth Century.

Register as "an aged farmer." Some of his handiwork and many of the trees he had planted, appear to have remained for people to stare at and talk about till the railway ran through or near The Folly, and though the place is not, and never will be, "as 'twas afore," yet the new has, perhaps, improved upon the old.

What a very dull world it will be when there remains no more folly in it. What a dreary life it will be when all picturesqueness has become eliminated; when a horrible monotony of universal conformity makes it unlawful and impossible for men and women to differ from one another in anything; when there are no more queer characters outside the lunatic asylums; when all the birds sing the same songs and dress alike in the winter and in the summer; when all the men and women speak the same language, and all the dear quaint varieties of dialect have become eliminated, when all the dogs wag the same tails, and-saddest consummation of all-when all the elders tell the same stories, and none of these stories have any point or interest in them.

Augustus Jessopp.

The Speaker.

William Watson.