"D'you know that the green of the cowslip is the most beautiful green in all Nature, Joan? Here, I have a flower, too; we will exchange if you like."
He took a scrap of blackthorn bloom from his coat and held it out to her, but she shrank backward and he learned something.
"Please not that—truly 'tis the dreadfulest wicked flower. Doan't 'e arsk
I to take en."
"Unlucky?"
"Iss fay! Him or her as first brings blackthorn in the house dies afore it blows again. Truth—solemn—us all knaws it down in these paarts. 'Tis a bewitched thing—a wicked plant, an' you can see it grawin' all humpetty-backed an' bent an' crooked. Wance, when a man killed hisself, they did use to bury en wheer roads met an' put a blackthorn stake through en; an' it all us grawed arter; an' that's the worstest sort o' all."
"Dear, dear, I'm glad you told me, Joan; I will not wear it, nor shall you," he said, and flung it down and stamped on it very seriously.
The girl was gratified.
"I judge you'm a furriner, else you'd knawn 'bout the wickedness o' blackthorn."
"I am. Thank you very much. But for you I should have gone home wearing it.
That puts me in your debt, Joan."
"'Tain't nothin', awnly there's a many coorious Carnish things like that.
An' coorious customs what some doan't hold with an' some does."