Page:Cornish feasts and folk-lore.djvu/217

 Ballads, etc. 205 (a song of numbers), when throwing ballast with shovels from a sand barge into a ship. The object was said to be threefold; 'to keep time {i.e. work simultaneously), to prevent anyone from shirking his share of work, and to cheer themselves for the labour,' which was by no means light. A shovelful of ballast was delivered by every man with each line of the song, which ran thus: — The Long Hundred. 'There goes one. One there is gone. Oh, rare one! And many more to come To make up the sum Of the hundred so long. 'There goes,' etc. on to twenty. " The song, it will be seen, consisted of twenty six-line stanzas ; hence when it was completed, each man had thrown on board one hundred and twenty, i.e. ' a long hundred,' shovelfuls of ballast. After a pause both the song and the ballasting were resumed, and so on to the end." — W. Pengelly. There are a great many jingling local rhymes and modern dialect poems not worth recording ; I will only quote two of the first : — Elicompane. "What is your name?— Elicompane. Who gave you that name? — My master and dame. How long will you keep it ?— As long as I like it. How long will that be?— As long as me and my master agree." Polwhele calls a tomtit " Elicompane ; " and says " There is a vulgar tradition that it is a bird by day and a toad by night." Uncle Jan Dory. " I'll tell 'ee a story 'bout Uncle Jan Dory, Who lived by the side of a well, He went to a 'plomp' (pump), and got himself drunk. And under the table he fell." The Cornish peasantry of the last century were very fond of riddles, but most of them will not bear repetition ; they are (as