Good morrow, Valentine, I go to-day,
To wear for you what you must pay,
A pair of gloves next Easter-day.
In Oxfordshire I have heard the following lines intended, I believe, for the same festival:
The rose is red, the violet's blue,
The gilly-flower sweet, and so are you;
These are the words you bade me say
For a pair of new gloves on Easter-day.
[LENT-CROCKING.]
Parties of young people, during Lent, go to the most noted farmhouses, and sing, in order to obtain a crock of cake, an old song beginning—
I see by the latch
There is something to catch;
I see by the string
The good dame's within;
Give a cake, for I've none;
At the door goes a stone.
Come give, and I'm gone.
"If invited in," says Mrs. Bray, "a cake, a cup of cider, and a health followed. If not invited in, the sport consisted in battering the house door with stones, because not open to hospitality. Then the assailant would run away, be followed and caught, and brought back again as prisoner, and had to undergo the punishment of roasting the shoe. This consisted in an old shoe being hung up before the fire, which the culprit was obliged to keep in a constant whirl, roasting himself as well as the shoe, till some damsel took compassion on him, and let him go; in this case he was to treat her with a little present at the next fair."
[CARE-SUNDAY.]
Care Sunday, care away,
Palm Sunday and Easter-day.
Care-Sunday is the Sabbath next before Palm Sunday, and the second before Easter. Etymologists differ respecting the origin of the term. It is also called Carling-Sunday, and hence the Nottinghamshire couplet: