Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/480

 458 house afterwards, the head bricklayer called after the nurse, "The little boy will have no luck with the stone if he don't wet the brick!" When she told me this, I took back the child later in the day with a small coin to give to the friendly bricklayer who had superintended his work, and I found the words "No luck" scribbled upon the brick he had laid.

On our next visit to the house, we found that the words had been smudged out, but after the laying of the date-stone, which we were careful to "butter" with a variety of coins, we noticed that even the smears were carefully washed off.

In my native district (the borders of Shropshire and Staffordshire) this would have been called "paying his foot-ale." The builder of our house tells us that when the first chimney is finished he himself will have to give the men a pint of ale apiece, after which they will hoist a flag on the roof-tree. If they do not get the ale, they will very likely hoist a black flag, and perhaps even refuse to continue the work.

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(Cf. p. 347.)

There was a field near Warminster on which it always rained when the hay was cut. Years ago, the farmer, to induce his men to work on a Sunday in order to get his hay, hid his watch under the last haycock, pretended to have lost it, and set them to search for it. The hay-crop on that field has always been damaged by rain ever since, " so the old men used to tell me," said G. W., a labouring man from Warminster, from whose narration I noted down this story in June, 1888. Charlotte S. Burne.

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Near Thirsk there is a field where folks say that the Battle of Waterloo (!) was fought, when the blood ran over the hoofs of the horses.