Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/247

Rh He had forgotten "the rest of their nominy," but it was doubtless either a petition or a blessing. The "pen" was appropriate to "Master William" as the scholar of the family; he was the only one who attained to a University career. The rest, I understood, would have other special emblems assigned to them.

The mummers came about eight o'clock in the evening, in winter, and hammered at the back-kitchen door, and came in without ceremony. They walked round the kitchen and sang, "and then began their tragedy." They wore masks. They represented King George, and the Doctor, and so on, and said, "Rise up, King George, and fight again!" Mrs. Whitelegge, my uncle's mother, quoted the doctor's speech,

at the age of eighty-five, when medicine was offered to her in her last illness, 1869.

Except for a recollection of furmety as a dish eaten at the Wakes, (the Church is St. Wilfrid's, but the Wakes he thought were kept on the first Sunday in October), this concluded my uncle's folklore reminiscences. It will be seen that he clearly distinguishes between the pace-eggers who begged for eggs at Easter, and the mummers who performed the "tragedy" of King George at Christmas; while my mother was equally clear that at Bury the pace-eggers performed the King George play at Easter: in fact she habitually called our local Shropshire and Staffordshire mummers the "pace-eggers." Both traditions are corroborated by printed records, and an investigation of the encroachment of one custom on the other ought to throw useful light on the variations of traditional practices.

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texte ci-dessous me paraît mériter d'être tiré du livre où il est comme enterré. D'abord on y voit les loups jouer le rôle