by the sons of Cymru.
With health, with nourishment imbued,
   The sweet cool milk and flummery.

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

On sultry days when appetites
   Wane dull, and low, and queasy,
When loathing stomachs nought delights,
   To gulph our flummery’s easy.
Dear oaten jelly, pride of Wales!
   Thou smooth-faced child of Cymry.
On the ruddy swain regales,
   And blesses milk and flummery.

’Tis sweet to stroll on Cambrian heights
   O’er-looking vales and rivers.
Where thin and purest air invites,
   The soul from spleen delivers;
That foe of bile the light repast
   To bloated gout may come wry.
But Nature’s child, thy mid-day fast
   Break thou with milk and flummery.

CHAPTER V.

Another lecture in Welsh.  “Courting in bed.”  Our hero’s education progresses.  The Curate’s school.

Whilst our lovers were regaling themselves upon milk and flummery, Twm Shon Catty was concocting and putting into execution his first practical joke, for while they sat side by side at the goodly oak table, he 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 unite about them their various articles of attire.

This freak being performed, Twm stole off unperceived, and getting on the outside of the door, he was joined by Watt the mole catcher, and a party of children instructed for the purpose, in a loud and astounding cry of mad bull! a mad bull! at the same time forcing before them into the house a little trotting calf, whose buttocks were tortured by Twm’s ox-goad till he reared and capered up to the very table where the lover’s sat.  Catty screamed, and both jumped up mutually terrified, as sudden fear had magnified the little animal to the proportions of an enormous brute of an enraged bull, whose uninvited visit and uncalled for appearance at their dinner table, portending nothing less than death.  When Twm and Watt’s laughter at length undeceived them, the spoon merchant, who had been so liberally assisted with spoon and meat, found to his dismay, that with his heart Catty had carried away the skirt of his coat, by the sudden jerk of rising from their seats; and had the gods made Jack poetical, he might have exclaimed with the renowned Mr. Tag,—[31]

The lovely maid on whom I dote
Hath made a spencer of my coat.

The wicked urchin who caused this unsanctioned union continued with his mischievous party, their laughter long and loud, and Catty’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 poor 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, that on this festal occasion 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 finisher of the law, although some persons roundly asserted that she was in fact a relict of one John Ketch, Esquire, of Stretch-neck-Place, Session 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 parent did not punish him for it,—an omission that might have watered the root of a vast tree of after enormities, but the mirthful mind rarely produces such an upas monstrosity.

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

To our English readers it may be a piece of information if we make known that in some parts of Wales, “Courting in bed” is very common.  It was so, at least when the first and second editions of this work were issued, but now is confined only to a few particular districts.  Some of our readers may be shocked; but when they are assured that the custom embraces nothing which is not consistent with the strictest honour, they will perhaps accord our ancient custom a little more charity.  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 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 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 was closely examined on this head; and woe to those who had the temerity to assert that there was no harm in the custom; or 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 by a scanty fire in a chimney corner.

Mrs. Graspacre was certainly a very 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 a woman burnt alive who would submit to be courted in bed.

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 these occasions the poor girls never escaped personal violence from the indignant and persevering Mrs. Graspacre.  She also assured them in language undistinguished for choiceness or delicacy, that “they were not to try and hoodwink her by telling her it meant nothing.  She knew better, she had not lived all these years to be lied to and cheated by a common w—e.”  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: in the next, the offenders preferred running away without payment of their wages,