"No, zur!" bridling up. "No, zur—not pints, good English quarts. And then—I hadn't come to the end o' my zongs, only I were that fuddled, I couldn't remember no more."
"Sixteen quarts between feeling fresh and getting fuddled!"
"Sixteen. Ask Voysey; he paid for'n."
Now this Voysey is a man working for me, so I did ask him. He laughed and said, "Sure enough, I had to pay for sixteen quarts that evening."
Another of my old singers is James Olver, a fine, hale old man, with a face fresh as a rose, and silver hair, a grand old patriarchal man, who has been all his life a tanner. He is a Cornishman, a native of St. Kewe. His father was musical, but a Methodist, and so strict that he would never allow his children to sing a ballad or any profane song in his hearing, and fondly fancied that they grew up in ignorance of such things. But the very fact that they were tabooed gave young Olver and his sister a great thirst to learn, digest, and sing them. He acquired them from itinerant ballad-singers, from miners, and from the village song-men.
Olver was apprenticed to a tanner at Liskeard. "Tell'y," said he, "at Liskeard, sixty years ago, all the youngsters on summer evenings used to meet in a field outside the town called Gurt Lane, and the ground were strewed wi' tan, and there every evening us had wrastling (wrestling), and single-stick, and boxing. Look'y here,"—he put his white head near me and raised the hair,—"do'y see now how my head be a cut about? and look to my forehead and cheek as was cut open wi' single-stick. I wor a famous player in them days; and the gentlefolks and ladies 'ud come out and see us at our sports, just as they goes now to cricket-matches."
Whilst the games went on, or between the intervals, songs were sung. "I'll sing'y one," said Olver, "was a favourite, and were sung to encourage the youngsters."
1."I sing of champions bold,
That wrestled—not for gold;