Page:Early Reminiscences.djvu/191

Rh Now, alas, that is at an end, banished by hay-tossing and hay-raking machinery!

A sound rarely heard now is that of the flail with its rhythmic throb on the thrashing floor. It is now only to be heard when some "reed" is being thrashed for thatching. The grain at this day is driven out of the husks by a steam thrashing machine.

I suppose the plough-boy still sings or whistles when driving his team, but I do not hear him now. It was otherwise formerly; and our folk-songs abound in plough-boy ballads.

A pretty little lay of the plough-boy was sung to me by Samuel Gilbert, who for fifty-two years had been landlord of the Falcon Inn at Mawgan; he was aged eighty-one in 1891. But I got the same song from J. Old at S. Eval, from John Dingle, Coryton, and from R. Hard at South Brent.

A curious custom now entirely lost was the "Crying a neck." At harvest time the reapers left one portion to the last.

Mrs. Bray in her Borders of the Tamar and the Tavy, writing to Robert Southey on June 9, 1832, said: "One evening, about the end of harvest, I was riding out on my pony, attended by a servant who was a born and bred Devonian. We were passing near a field on the borders of Dartmoor, where the reapers were