Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 6.djvu/95

 ii s. vi. JULY 27, i9ii] NOTES AND QUERIES.

names, " troule in madame " or " trol-my- dames," the latter alias being preferred in

The Winter's Tale.'

' The Christmas Prince ' (1607) says :

Why say you not that Munday will bee drunke, Keeps all unruly wakes, and playes at trunkes ?

and, again, in ' Poor Robin ' for 1715 :

" After dinner (for you must not have too long intermissions) to your sack again, typire, topire, .and tropere, and for recreations to such liquor, billiards, kettle-pins, noddy-boards, tables, trunks, shovel-boards, fox and geese, and those two excellent games at cards, one and thirty, and drive knaves out of town."

" Pewter," however, and " tapping " Brand apparently overlooks, though as to the latter, a custom pursued at fair-time under that name lingered on at Elstow, Beds (the Immortal Tinker's birthplace), until half a century ago. To describe it I shall quote bits from an article, ' Vanity Fair and Elstow Tapping,' which appeared in The Beds Times and Independent a year or two ago :

" Up to two or three generations ago, at many of the cottages the inmates were still allowed to retail beer during the week of the Fair, commen- cing on the previous Sunday, which was known as Elstow Tapping that being the day on which the barrels were tapped. The people practised the old-fashioned custom, of hanging out a bush or bough by way of sign to the houses where the beer was sold.... The Sunday after the Fair was known as ' Elstow Tilting,' for then the con- tents of the barrel was at its last ebb."

R. A. H. UNTHANK.

'PISHOKEN' (11 S. v. 509). I do not know anything as to the nature of the song, but may tell MB. J. A. CBAWLEY that it is twice mentioned in the prose narrative of the " Peregrination " of Hogarth and his companions by Forrest, which Hone happily reprinted in ' The Table Book ' (p. 560, &c.) :

" At Cuckold's Point we sang St. John, at Deptford, Pishoken."

When at Queenborough the friends

" were quite put out of countenance by some Harwich men who came with lobsters and were drinking in the next room. They sang several sea-songs so agreeably that our St. John could not come into competition, nor could Pishoken save us from disgrace, so that after finishing the evening as pleasantly as possible, we went out of the house the back-way to our lodgings, at near eleven."

It is rather surprising, I think, that George Augustus Sala, who knew so many things, did not throw some light on ' St. John ' and

Pishoken ' in his discursive ' William Hogarth, Painter, Engraver, and Philo- sopher ' ; but I cannot find that he even mentions them. His chap, v. was partly

based on a rimed account of his hero's expedition, due to a clergyman named Gostling, who, although he followed Forrest pretty closely, does not particularize the songs. Mr. Sala errs in attributing the lines to Forrest. He says :

" There is certainly nothing very elevated in good Mr. Forrest's Hudibrastics ; yet the jingle of his verse is by no means disagreeable " ; and I should like to add that it is quite in accordance with its theme.

ST. SWITHIN.

" DAGGS " : " To SET DAGGS " (11 S. v. 507). As far as I remember, we used this expression in some relation to a dagger. A couple of lads on the verge of a fight would ask each other to " dare daggs " or was " dare daggs " when, anything of a reckless nature was about to be done. Boys fighting were urged on by their sup- porters with shouts of " dagg him," " give him daggs."
 * ' put up your daggs." Another expression

In the top season there was the game of " dagg-top." A ring was made on the ground, in which one boy set his top a- spinning. The next player threw his "dagg- top " at the spinning top in the ring, hoping the spike of his would " dagg " the other and maybe split it. Boy after boy followed on. A top spun with a cord spins till it " dies," and dies with a roll. If the roll did not carry the top outside the ring, it had to remain subject to the " daggs " of all the tops following till the end of the game before its owner could regain it, unless it was knocked out of the ring by " a dagg " from another top. That was the game as played in Derby and the neighbourhood sixty years ago. I think "dag-too," with a single g, the better way of spelling.

THOS. RATCLIFFE. Worksop.

SNAKE POISON (11 S. v. 388, 455). A curious answer, too simple to be true, is in Lyon's ' How to keep Bees for Profit,' pp. 16, 80, viz., that the poison of the bee is similar to that of the rattlesnake, in the propor- tion 1 to 500, the poison being formic acid. Perhaps the latest article on the real com- plexity of the poisons is A. F. Coca's ' The Plurality of the Toxic Substances of Snake Venoms,' in Zeitschrift f. Immunitdts- forsch. u. exper. Therap., Jena, 1912, xii. 134-42. Probably the most satisfactory work is H. Noguchi's ' Snake Venoms,' &c., published by the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1909.