“White may my milking be,
White as thee;
Thy face is white, thy neck is white,
Thy hands are white, thy feet are white,
For thy sweet soul is shining bright—
O dear to me,
O dear to see,
St. Bridget White!
Yellow may my butter be,
Firm, and round:
Thy breasts are sweet,
Firm, round, and sweet,
So may my butter be:
So may my butter be, O
Bridget Sweet!
Safe thy way is, safe, O
Safe, St. Bride:
May my kye come home at even,
None be fallin’, none be leavin’,
Dusky even, breath-sweet even,
Here, as there, where O
St. Bride thou
Keepest tryst with God in heav’n,
Seest the angels bow
And souls be shriven—
Here, as there, ’tis breath-sweet even
Far and wide—
Singeth thy little maid
Safe in thy shade
Bridget, Bride!”
When the first lambs appear, many are the invocations among the Irish and Hebridean Gaels to good St. Bride. At the hearth-side, too, the women, carding wool, knitting, telling tales, singing songs, dreaming—these know her whether they name her in thought, or have forgotten what was dear wisdom to their mothers of old. She leans over cradles, and when babies smile they have seen her face. When the cra’thull swings in the twilight, the slow rhythm, which is music in the mother’s ear, is the quiet clapping of her hushing hands. St Bride, too, loves the byres or the pastures when the kye are milked, though now she is no longer ‘the Woman of February,’ but simply ‘good St. Bride of the yellow hair.’
THE HERALDS OF MARCH
Under this heading I had meant to deal with the return of the Plover and Lapwing, having in mind a Galloway rhyme,
“Whaup, Whimbrel, an’ Plover,
Whan these whustle the worst o’ t’s over!”
But on consideration it was evident that March has so complicated an orchestral prelude that the name could hardly be given to any one group of birds. Does not another rhyme go,
“The Lavrock, the Mavis,
The Woodlark, the Plover,
March brings them back
Because Winter is over.”
But March brings back so many birds! There is another bird-rhyme ...
“When the Song-Thrush is ready to laugh,
Ye’ll hear the Woodlark an’ the Wheatear an’ the Chaff.”
Well, the Song-Thrush has been ‘ready to laugh’ a good while back, now: his ‘laughter’ has already whirled the flute-notes of Spring, amid branches swelling to leaf-break, but not yet at the greening. The Chiff-Chaff has been heard on many a common, or on the ridge of a stone-dyke, or calling from the blackthorn thickets. The Wheatear has by this time delighted many a superstitious yokel who has caught his first glimpse of it sitting on a grassy tuft, or on a low spray of gorse or juniper, or depressed him sorely if he has come upon it for the first time when seen perched on a stone. But all three are birds which are with us long before the real Spring is come. With the missel-thrush on the elm-bole, the song-thrush in the copses, the blackbird calling from the evergreens, it does not follow, alas! that, as in the fairy-tale, the north wind has become a feeble old man and the east wind a silly old wife. Frost and snow and sleet, rain and flood, and the dull greyness of returned winter, may only too likely succeed these blithe heralds, have so succeeded, this year, as we know to our cost. There was jubilation in some places at January-end because of the early singing of the larks, which here and there had been heard soon after the New Year; but those who rejoiced untimely at the advent of spring-weather must have forgot the north-country proverb, ‘As long as the laverock sings before Candlemas it will greet after it.’