Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/211

Rh higgling of the market, is practised at school in Teviotdale when pupils are exchanging articles of different value (niffering). The "fair horny," or appeal in these cases to honest dealing, is in Cumberland used by colliers in dividing mutual gains. The leaping game of "feut-an'-a-half" is played alike on both sides of the Border. To the many Cumberland child-rhymes I add this from the Border,

The old game, "Scots and English," is known in Cumberland as "Watch Weds." Each side put its caps at equal distances from a dividing line drawn on the ground between the rows. Pillaging then went on across the line. If one were caught, he was retained prisoner. In "wed" here we have the familiar wad, a pledge or surety.

The folk-lore of play never travels far from its native district unless on the strong current of the very modern Golf Stream. Cumberland boys, of course, know all about marbles, which they assort as alleys, steanies, and gingers or pots. The last was a rough, common marble of red half-baked clay and partially glazed. Steanies were brightly coloured, very hard, and highly glazed: "Hoo mony steany marbles do ye gi' for a ho'penny?" The rough horse-play of the grown-ups, the halflins or hobbledehoys, is hinted at in the once popular but now obsolete amusement, "girnin throo a braffin"—the Scots brecham or horse-collar. This is the comic side of the much older and really tragic, but seemingly off-hand, description of death on the gallows: "girnin in a widdie," or rope of hazel twigs.

No account of old-time pleasures in the uplands would be complete without some allusion to poaching. The humours of local government through the Great Unpaid were never more neatly hit off than in the speech: "When ah's a magistrate ah'll luik ower sec things as sniggin an' nettin." Sniggin was catching salmon as they lay in the pools by means of a bunch of hooks, "t'west Coomerlan flee." These rake-hooks sniggled over the bottom like eels, "snig” being an obsolete name for a young eel. In those old days work and pleasure were blended