Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 5 1887.djvu/224

 216 dancing without shoes on the furze prickles which get detached from the stalk. It is considered extremely unlucky here to break or lose your wedding-ring, also for a wedding-cake to crack after baking. A lady told me of one made for a couple she knew, which fell to pieces when taken out of the oven. Before the wedding came the bride had sickened of some disorder, was dead and buried. A hole in a loaf, too, foretells a separation in a family; and to turn one upside down on a table wrecks a vessel.

Only old maids can rear a myrtle, and they will not blossom when trained against houses where there are none.

"A young woman who has been three times a bridesmaid will never be a bride." "It was an old custom, religiously observed until lately in Zennor and adjacent parishes on the north coast of Cornwall, to waylay a married couple on their wedding night and flog them to bed with cords, sheep-spans, or anything handy for the purpose, believing that this rough treatment would ensure them happiness and the 'heritage and gift that cometh from the Lord,' of a numerous family. At more modish weddings, the guests merely entered the bridal chamber, and threw stockings in which stones or something to make weight were placed, at the bride and bridegroom in bed. The first one hit of the happy pair betokened the sex of their first-born."—Bottrell.

Should there be a great discrepancy between the ages of the bride and bridegroom, or the marriage of a couple in any way be a matter of notoriety, they are in West Cornwall on their wedding night often treated to a "shallal," a serenade on tin-kettles, pans, marrow-bones, &c. Any great noise in this part of the county is described as being "a reg'lar shallal." In olden times, and in fact the custom is not quite discontinued at the present day, for I heard a whisper of one having taken place in a small fishing-village two years ago. Married people accused of immorality were in Cornwall punished by a "riding." I will give the description of one by Mr. T. Q. Couch.

"A cart was got, donkeys were harnessed in, and a pair personating the guilty or suspected were driven through the streets, attended by a train of men and boys. At Polperro (East Cornwall) the attendants acted as trumpeters; the bullock's horns used by the fishermen at sea