Wood (Babes in the), a baby boy and girl left by a gentleman of Norfolk on his death-bed to the care of his brother. The boy was to have £300 a year on coming of age, and little Jane £500 as a wedding portion. The uncle promised to take care of the children, but scarcely had a year gone by when he hired two ruffians to make away with them. The hirelings took the children on horseback to Wayland Wood, where they were left to die of cold and hunger. The children would have been killed, but one of the fellows relented, expostulated with his companion, and finally slew him. The survivor compromised with his conscience by leaving the babes alive in the wood. Everything went ill with the uncle from that hour; his children died, his cattle died, his barns were set on fire, and he himself died in jail.
⁂ The prettiest version of this story is one set to a Welsh tune; but Percy has a version in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.
Woodcock (Adam), falconer of the Lady Mary at Avenel Castle. In the revels he takes the character of the “abbot of Unreason.”--Sir W. Scott, The Abbot (time, Elizabeth).
Woodcock (Justice), a gouty, rheumatic, crusty, old country gentleman, who invariably differed with his sister, Deb´orah, in everything. He was a bit of a Lothario in his young days, and still retained a somewhat licorous tooth. Justice Woodcock had one child, named Lucinda, a merry girl, full of frolic and fun.
Deborah Woodcock, sister of the justice; a starch, prudish old maid, who kept the house of her brother, and disagreed with him in everything.--Isaac Bickerstaff, Love in a Village (1762).
Woodcocks (The). John Woodcock, a rough, reckless colonist, who seems harsh to his motherless girl while she is a child, but subsequently betrays the depths of fatherly affection when she is persecuted by others.
Mary Woodcock, wild, wayward, passionate girl, in trouble from her youth up. She marries a gentle-hearted fellow, Hugh Parsons; is tried for slandering a neighbor, and, driven insane by ill-treatment, murders her baby, believing it to be a changeling. She is tried for witchcraft, and acquitted; for child-murder, and sentenced to death, but dies before the sentence is carried into execution. Her father says over her lifeless body:
“If I didn’t think the Lord would see just how she’s been abused and knocked round, and would allow for the way she was brung up, and would strike out all He’s got agin her, excepting that that didn’t come from bein’ meddled with and insulted and plagued, I should want to have her an’ me an’ everybody else I care anything about, blown into a thousand flinders, body and soul, and all the pieces lost.”--J. G. Holland, The Bay Path (1857).
Woodcourt (Allan), a medical man, who married Esther Summerson. His mother was a Welsh woman, apt to prose on the subject of Morgan-ap-Kerrig.--C. Dickens, Bleak House (1852).
Wooden Horse (The). Virgil tells us that Ulysses had a monster wooden horse, made by Epēos after the death of Hector, and gave out that it was an offering to the gods to secure a prosperous voyage back to Greece. By the advice of Sinon, the Trojans dragged the horse into Troy for a palladium; but at night the Grecian soldiers concealed therein were released by Sinon from their concealment, slew the Trojan guards, opened the city gates, and set fire to Troy. Arctīnos of Milētus, in his poem called The Destruction of Troy, furnished Virgil with the tale of “the Wooden Horse” and “the burning of Troy” (fl. B.C. 776).