Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. " Of strange tradition many a mystic trace, Legend and vision, prophecy and sign." Sco-it. At the gatherings among country people, there is often a large amount of gossip and curious surmises about persons and things generally. An old maiden lady once asked another rather younger, when busy at the quilting frames, " What head do old maids come under in the prayers of the Church, think you ? " The other replied, " Perhaps as the desolate and oppressed." The expressions in this part of the country are peculiar, e.g., " As dead as a herring," " As slippery as an eel," " As sharp as a lop," " As poor as a kirk mouse," " As feckless as a hen," " As fause as a fox," " It snapt like a bunnel" (hemlock), " He will not part wi' th' reek of his kail," " He would skin a flint," " An idle man is a lazy lout—a sly one as deft as a thief in a mill." The proverbs are innumerable, e.g., " Never cast a clout till May be out," " Easy got, easy gone," " Many haws, many cold toes," " Like master, like man," " Dree as haver (oat) malt," " Fleec't ewe, fleec't lamb," " Love me, love my dog." An eccentric tailor once played off a joke upon some men who professed geology, by telling them he could get any quantity of specimens from an extinct volcano, not far from Kirkby Stephen. They told him to send some to an address in London, and gave him a guinea. On coming down the next year, after being heartily laughed at at home for their gullibility, they sent for the tailor, a well-known wit, and after upbraiding him with sending a lot of slag and rubbish, he said if they would pay his passage to London and back he would go and explain it to the gentlemen, who had, he assured them, not understood the specimens. A bystander was so tickled that he slipped half a crown into the tailor's ...