Page:Cornish feasts and folk-lore.djvu/23

 she gets it by stratagem; her husband, who knows nothing of the compact, first meets the devil, whilst out hunting, the day before the time is up, and makes him half-drunk. An old woman in Duffy's pay (Witch Bet) completes the work, and in that state the devil sings the following words, ending with his name, which Bet remembers and tells her mistress : —

Bet and some other witches then sing in chorus:—

Mr. Robert Hunt in his Romances and Drolls of Old Cornwall has a variation of this play, in which the devil sings—

These "goose-dancers" became such a terror to the respectable inhabitants of Penzance that the Corporation put them down about ten years since, and every Christmas-eve a notice is posted in conspicuous places forbidding their appearance in the streets, but they still perambulate the streets of St. Ives. Guise-dancing wit must have very much deteriorated since the beginning of the present century, as writers before that time speak of the mirth it afforded; and the saying, "as good as a Christmas-play," is commonly used to describe a very witty or funny thing. It was the custom in Scilly eighty years ago for girls to go to church on Christmas morning dressed all in white, verifying the old proverb—"pride is never a-cold."

"On Porthminster Beach on Christmas-day, as seen from the Malakofif, St. Ives, at nine o'clock in the morning the boys began to