But now Dan Phoebus gains the middle skie,
And liberty unbars her prison-door;
And like a rushing torrent out they fly,
And now the grassy cirque han cover’d o’er
With boist’rous revel-rout and wild uproar.
An old Village Dame
Shenstone’s old dame kept a ‘birchen tree’ from which she cut her ‘scepter’; he does not mention the other weapon of torture wielded by these female tyrants, which was the thimble. The poor children were rapped on the head with a thimbled finger, and the operation was known as thimble-pie making. The old dame that I remember, who must have been one of the last of all her race, was of milder mood than these. Her name was Mrs. Price, and she dwelt in a remote and picturesque corner of Herefordshire called Tedstone Delamere. I cannot call it a village, or even a hamlet, for the houses were so very few and far between. Mrs. Price’s scholars were mere baby creatures, old enough to run about and get into mischief, or court danger, and yet too young to be sent to the parish school with their bigger brothers and sisters. So busy mothers were glad to pay a trifling sum to have these little ones tended by a motherly old widow-woman for a few hours every morning. But the time came when age and infirmity debarred her from even this light task, and her cottage no longer resounded with those noises which ‘Do learning’s little tenement betray’. I found her one day sitting all alone with an open Bible on the table beside her, and her spectacles lying idle in her lap. She looked tired and dispirited, and said her eyes were so bad that she had been obliged to stop reading, and sit doing nothing. Naturally I offered to read aloud to her awhile, and I inquired what had been engaging her attention. ‘Oh,’ said she, ‘I’d just got to where the frogs came up upon Pharaoh.’ I took the book, and read on and on, for each time I came to ‘the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart’, the aged Mrs. Price evinced such satisfaction over the prospect of yet another Plague, that I had not the heart to cut a long story short. At last when Pharaoh had finally bidden the Israelites ‘be gone’, I closed the Bible, and as I did so, the old lady exclaimed, ‘Ain’t that nice readin’!’ One would not have thought that the history of the seven Plagues of Egypt was exactly the portion of Scripture best fitted to cheer and comfort a lone and feeble old woman. Perhaps it stirred old fires in her blood, rekindling memories of the days when children deemed her ‘the greatest wight on ground’, when she held the reins of power, distributing rewards and punishments as the honoured head of a Dame’s School.