We workers could not attend much on this particular occasion, any more than a cook can enjoy the dinner she has cooked. We could not take our eyes off our own special rail that we had wreathed, and kept hoping our flowers wouldn’t topple suddenly because we hadn’t tied them securely enough, or wilt during the sermon. I noticed a curious sort of doll, standing on the altar-steps, dressed in three tissue-paper flounces and a sash. As we came out I asked old John Peacock what it was, and he said, “Why, that wor t’ Kern babby!” I was no wiser. But Ariadne, who dotes on superstitions, said she would ask the Vicar. She wrote him a pretty note in her all backwards hand, and said she felt sure the doll on the altar-steps was a heathen survival of some sort. This was his answer; he was pleased.
“My dear Miss Vero-Taylor,
“Your interest in the study of folk-lore is highly commendable in one so young. The little mannikin—or rather womankin—is, as you aptly conjecture, a remnant of a custom dating from a period of the very remotest antiquity. In our Northumbrian villages it is the custom, the moment the sickle is laid down, for the villagers to dress the last sheaf in tawdry finery and carry it through the streets, finally when it presides at the Harvest, or Mell Supper, and the people dance round it singing:
‘Blest be the day that Christ was born!
We’ve getten Mell of Ball’s corn!
It’s well bun’ and better shorn!
Hip! Hip! Hurray!’
“This custom was found, however, so prevocative of disorderly scenes that my revered predecessor here decreed that in future the Mell Doll (or Kern baby) should be simply placed on the altar-steps during Divine Service. Is it not wonderful to reflect that this grotesque image prefigures no less a personage than Ceres, the goddess of plenty, the Frigga of the Teutons, sometimes called Freia, Frey, conf. Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology, passim—”
“Oh yes, pass him, pass him!” said Peter impatiently, who won’t however let any one else make fun of the church, and scolded Christina for saying,
“Rather a come-down for a goddess, wasn’t it?”
“Well,” she remarked to Ariadne later on, “you had better be getting up your mythology” (meaning the Bible, only Peter didn’t twig anything so wrapped up as this), “because you will be sure to be subpœna’d to take a class in the Sunday school after you have fished for it. Nemo Dodd impune lacessit!”
“Can’t Dodd lace his boots with impunity?” I asked Peter. I knew it wasn’t that, any more than Res angusta domi means “Please to keep Augusta at home,” and some others like that I have made.
Sure enough, Mr. Dodd made Ariadne take a class in his Sunday school, and Christina chuckled. It is the price of Mr. Dodd’s admiration, and he admired Ariadne very much. She is not really any happier for it, rather bored by it in fact. She spent three whole days getting up Sacred History for fear the school children, who have of course been properly brought up and grounded, should floor her, a poor feckless literary man’s daughter. Peter Ball gave her a little arithmetic. She got as far as Proportion with him. There was one sum about how many men it would take to build a wall of so many feet in so many hours. If it was Inverse Proportion, which it might be, and then again it mightn’t, you put the men under the wall and divide by the hours; as many of them as are left after such treatment is the answer. It came, stupidly enough, two-and-a-half, so I suggested to Ariadne, as I was helping her, to put Two men and a boy. Peter said she didn’t repay teaching, and saw nothing to laugh at, though his wife seemed to.