Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/302

 280 making by cutting the curve of the elbow wrong; on which his master, out of all patience, ran the bodkin into his side and knocked him over the board with the goose. After this he took service with a blacksmith, and attempted to shoe a horse, but he only pricked the horse, and drove the nails into his own finger. As a farrier he maltreated the horse; as a tinker he split the caldrons he should have mended; as a carpenter he wounded himself with the chopper, bruised his hands with the plane, fell over the logs of wood he should have sawn, and got the toothache from the noise produced by filing the tools. Lastly, as a shoemaker, he took wrong measures, and lost the rubsticks which were under his care, till his master gave him a severe “yocking,” and disgusted him for ever with the awl and the last. Nothing remained to him but to start verse-maker, and wander from alehouse to alehouse, singing the drinking-songs he composed.

The honest Yorkshiremen under the Hambleton hills bring in the devil’s name when they account for their custom of saying their prayers aloud—a most praiseworthy one, though Margaret, in Much Ado About Nothing, reckons it among her “ill qualities.” They say that the devil hears them, and lets them alone for that night at least. Now it is remarkable that Sir Richard Baker, in his Meditations and Disquisitions upon the Lord’s Prayer (1638, p. 7), after recommending vocal prayer as pleasing to God, and giving cause of joy to the angels, proceeds: “We shall doe well to use vocall prayers if it be only to fright the devill. For he sees not our hearts, but he heares our tongues: and when hee heares our words, because he knowes not our hearts, hee feares they come from our hearts, and in that feare hee trembles: and we shall doe well, as much as we can, to keepe him under our feare, seeing he endeavours as much as he can to bring us under his power.”