Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/455

Rh another, when the voice again said, "Put that down! That's mine?" "What?" he replied, "did you have two heads? Then I'll have one of them." And so he won his wager. (June, 1894.)

A Wager Lost.—There formerly stood on Milton Common a gibbet on which a man called Price was hanged in chains. Some farmers and workmen were drinking together at the "Three Pigeons" at Tetsworth one night, when the talk turned on Price hanging on the gibbet. One of them, taking up his mug, said "Here's a health to poor old Price!" when another said, "You don't dare go and drink his health under the gibbet at twelve o'clock for a guinea." The bet was taken, but before the man started for the gibbet, the one who had made the wager slipped off and climbed to the top of the post and sat on it. Soon after the others came up, and the man who had taken the bet picked up the mug and said, "Here's to your health. Price!" The man on the top answered in a hollow voice, "Thank you, it's very cold up here," and the other was so frightened that he dropped the mug and lost the wager.

(From Wm. Barney, estate carpenter, of Tetsworth.)

It is said that when the flesh dropped from Price's bones from constant exposure to the weather, the top of the skull fell in, and some birds built their nests in it and hatched out eight young ones. The following rhyme was made about this:

Another rhyme was this:

(From—Latham, farmer, of Tetsworth, who had them from his grandfather. 12 September, 1897.)

[Mr. G. Goodenough, of Milton Common Farm, not far from where the gibbet stood, tells me that he heard from an old man of ninety that Price met a "packman" in Lobb's Lane (as the high road east of the "Three Pigeons' Inn" was called), got into talk with him, and then borrowed his knife, pretending that he