Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 16, 1905.djvu/522

 464 Correspondence.

services were not required." — (Abridged from the Morfiing Post, May 16, 1905.)

M. Peacock.

A similar incident is reported in the Daily Telegraph of Thurs- day, August loth, 1905, on the authority of a telegraphic report from " our correspondent " at Colchester, where, at the camp of the Essex Volunteer Brigade, the officers of one battalion con- ducted, on the previous evening, the mock burial of an unpopular senior officer.

"After dinner some thirty officers turned out, attired in long black cloaks, and each carrying a lighted lantern. In front was borne a deck-chair, covered with a Union Jack, and supposed to bear the corpse of the officer referred to. The procession passed round the officers' lines, and a mock interment was conducted, after which the assembled officers sang a song, and indulged in quadrilles and a cake-walk, the proceedings closing with the National Anthem."

One is glad to read that "more is likely to be heard" of this case of degenerate survival.

Charlotte S. Burne.

The Mock Mayor of Headington.

When I was a boy at Headington, in Oxfordshire, a custom existed on the Wednesday of Whitsun-week, or, as it was called, " Whit-Wednesday," of chairing round the village, a man selected for the purpose — generally some drunken ne'er-do-well. A chair was made, I believe, from three or four hurdles, and covered with evergreens, with, I think, the addition of a few flowers. The hero of the day, who was jocularly described as the " Mayor of Head- ington," his face whitened with chalk, and picked out with red raddle, was set therein, after the manner of a Jack-in-the-box, and borne on the shoulders of four men through the village, preceded by the band, and accompanied by the banners of the village club. A halt was made at each public-house, where the " Mayor " made a speech (I remember one of Lord Palmerston's being read on one