still adheres to it, by soaking it in water till it acquires a slight taste of acidity, when it is strained through a hair sieve and boiled till it becomes a perfect jelly.  When poured from that picturesque prince of culinary vessels, the large three-legged iron pot, into a vast brown earthen dish, it presents a smooth smiling aspect of the most winning equanimity, till destroyed by the numerous invading spoons of the company, that plunge a portion of it, scalding hot, into their bowls of cool milk.  Thus much of its descriptive history is given, to illustrate the following ode in its immortal praise, with which we shall now close this long chapter.

MILK AND FLUMMERY.

Let luxury’s imbecile train,
   Of appetites fastidious,
Each sauced provocative obtain,
   The draught or viand perfidious;
But oh! give me that simple food,
   So dear to the sons of Cymru,
With health, with nourishment imbued,
   The sweet new milk and flummery.

Let pudding-headed English folks
   With boast of roast beef fag us;
Let Scottish Burns crack rural jokes,
   And vaunt kail-brose and haggis;
But Cymru’s sons! of mount and plain,
   From Brecknock to Montgomery,
Let us the honest praise maintain,
   Of sweet new milk and flummery.

On sultry days when appetites
   Wane dull, and low, and queasy,
When loathing stomachs nought delights,
   To gulp thee flumm’ry! ’s easy:
Dear oaten jelly, pride of Wales!
   Rude child of the vales of Cymru;
On thee the ruddy swain regales,
   And blesses milk and flummery.

’Tis sweet to stroll on Cambrian heights,
   O’erlooking vales and rivers,
Where bird-song sweet, with breeze unites,
   Each, sunshine rapture givers!
To crown their gust the light repast—
   So cool—can never come awry,
Oh sweet! to break the mid-day fast
   On sweet new milk and flummery.

CHAP. V.

An essay on courting in bed.  Our hero removed to the curate’s school.

The scene so lightly touched upon in the last chapter, between our schoolmistress and her beau, called forth the mischievous talents of little Twm Shôn Catti, who, while they sat side by side at the goodly oak table, fastened them together by the coat and gown with a peeled thorn spike, which, before the introduction of pins, was used by the fair sex to join together their various articles of attire.  When his mother rose suddenly to help her spoon-merchant with more spoon meat, she rather surprized him by carrying away, with his heart, the greater part of the tattered skirt of his old coat, so that Jack might have said, with Tag the author,

“The lovely maid on whom I doat,
Has made a spencer of my coat.”

The wicked urchin who caused this unsanctioned union, set up a loud laugh, and Catti’s grumpy sister Juggy, for the first time in her life, astonished them with a grin on the occasion.  Twm received a severe rebuke from his parent, and the hapless Jack, with the view of propitiating an evil spirit that might prove troublesome to him hereafter, made him a present of a new spoon, which, because it was merely a common one, he ungratefully threw into the blazing turf fire, which glowed on the hearth in a higher pile and wider dimensions than usual, and demanded one of his best box-wood ware.  Jack would have given it to him immediately, but for the intervention of his mother, who forbade the indulgence.  No sooner, however, was he gone than Twm watched his opportunity and purloined as many of the better sort as he could conveniently take away unperceived, and sold them at the cheap rate of stolen goods, to an old woman named, or rather nick-named, Rachel Ketch, from some supposed resemblance in her character to that of the finisher of the law, so surnamed, although some persons roundly asserted that she was in fact a relict one of those celebrated law officers, one John Ketch esquire, of Stretch-neck Place, Sessions Court, Carmarthen.  As no further consequence followed this act of unprovoked delinquency, it was scarcely worth mentioning, except that it stands as the first of the kind on record; and when discovered, Twm’s over affectionate mother did not punish him for it,—an omission much censured by rigid people, who construed this petty act into the slight root from which sprung the huge tree of his after enormities;

“But maudlin mothers, all, have tender hearts,
Too kind to root an early shoot of vice
By wholesome chastisement.  The little darlings!
Who could punish them, whate’er their faults?”

We come now to an era in this history when our hero entered another scene of life, in that of a new-school, which event was ushered in by unlooked for circumstances that must be first narrated.

It may not be unknown to our readers that there has existed a custom, in some parts of Wales, time out of mind, of courting in bed; this comfortable mode of forwarding a marriage connexion prevailed very generally at Tregaron, to the great scandal and virtuous indignation of the lady of Squire Graspacre.  It was amazing to witness with what energy this good gentlewoman set about reforming the people, by the forcible abolishment of what she was pleased to call, this odious, dangerous, blasphemous, and ungodly custom.  Her patronage was for ever lost to any man or woman, youth or maid, of the town or country, who was most distantly related to, or connected with any person who connived at bed courtship.  There was not a cottager who called at the great house for a pitcher of whey, skim milk, or buttermilk, as a return for labour in harvest time, but she closely examined on this head; and woe to the wretch who had the temerity to assert that there was no harm in the custom; or that that the wooers merely laid down in their clothes, and thus conversed at their ease on their future plans or prospects; or who denied that such a situation was more calculated for amorous caresses and endearments than sitting in the chimney corner.  Mrs. Graspacre was certainly, most outrageously virtuous—a very termagant of decorous propriety! if any person dared, in her presence, to advocate this proscribed and utterly condemned mode, disdaining to argue the point, she would settle the matter in a summary manner, peculiarly her own, by protesting she would have any woman burnt alive who would submit to be courted in bed.  To such a fiery argument no reply could possibly be made; and in time she found her account in this silencing sort of logic which gave her her own entire unimpeded way in every thing, which wonderfully restored her equanimity, and saved both time and temper to the parties concerned, who otherwise might have spent their precious hours, and more precious patience, in idle and irritable discussions on the subject.

In the course of two years there were no less than four young men, and twice as many damsels turned away from her service for courting in the hay-loft; and on those occasions the poor girls never escaped personal violence from the indignant and persevering Mrs. Graspacre.  In her flaming zeal for decorum, the tongs, the poker, the pitchfork, or the hay-rake, became an instrument of chastisement; a double advantage was discovered in the terror thus created, the dignity of her sex being in the first place asserted and supported, and in the next, the offenders preferred running away without payment of wages, to standing the chance of having their heads or arms broken with a