Page:Cornish feasts and folk-lore.djvu/40

 farther." When one boy succeeds in taking in another, he shouts after him, Fool! fool! the "guckaw" (cuckoo).

Towednack's (a village near St. Ives) "Cuckoo" or "Crowder" feast is on the nearest Sunday to the 28th April. Tradition accounts for the first name by the story of a man who there gave a feast on an inclement day in the end of April. To warm his guests he threw some faggots on the fire (or some furze-bushes), when a cuckoo flew out of them, calling "Cuckoo! cuckoo!" It was caught and kept, and he resolved every year to invite his friends to celebrate the event. This, too, is said to be the origin of the feast. "Crowder" in Cornwall means a fiddler, and the fiddle is called a "crowd." In former days the parishioners of Towednack were met at the church door on "feasten" day by a "crowder," who, playing on his "crowd," headed a procession through the village street, hence its second name.

The only May-pole now erected in Cornwall is put up on April 30th, at Hugh Town, St. Mary's, Scilly. Girls dance round it on May-day with garlands of flowers on their heads, or large wreaths of flowers from shoulder to waist. Dr. Stephen Clogg, of Looe, says that " May-poles are still to be seen on Mayday, at Pelynt, Dulver, and East and West Looe."—(W. Antiquary, August, 1884.) In the beginning of this century, boys and girls in Cornwall sat up until twelve o'clock on the eve of May-day, and then marched around the towns and villages with Musical Instruments, collecting their friends to go a-maying. May-day is ushered in at Penzance by the discordant blowing of large tin horns. At daybreak, and even earlier, parties of boys, five or six in number, assemble at the street corners, from whence they perambulate the town blowing their horns and conchshells. They enter the gardens of detached houses, stop and bray under the bedroom windows, and beg for money. With what they collect they go into the country, and at one of the farmhouses they breakfast on bread and clotted cream, junket, &c. An additional ring of tin (a penn'orth) is added to his horn every year that a boy uses it.

Formerly, on May-morn, if the boys succeeded in fixing a "May bough" over a farmer's door before he was up, he was considered