49
The Half-Cup of Tea
Katharine M. Briggs heard this story from Mrs. Madeline Mills about 1915, in Perthshire. It suggests Motif H381, “Bride test: thrift,” and Type 1451, The Thrifty Girl. See the Pennsylvania Dutch text in R. M. Dorson, Buying the Wind, pp. 146–48.
THERE WAS ONCE a man who always complained that whenever he asked for a half-cup of tea he always got a full one. No woman, he said, could pour out a half-cup of tea; and if he met one who could he’d marry her because she’d be a wonder. Well, one day he went to a garden party, and a young lady whom he hadn’t met before was helping his hostess.
She asked him if he’d like another cup of tea, and he said, “Just half, please.”
She poured him out exactly half. He looked at her with great respect, and he thought she was a very pretty girl. He found out her name, and he saw a lot of her after that, and liked her more and more, and in the end he asked her to marry him. They were married, and on the honeymoon she said, “What made you first think of me?”
“Well, do you remember the first day we met?” said her husband, “when I asked you for half a cup of tea?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, “I remember. There wasn’t a drop more in the pot, and I was so ashamed.”
50
The Five-Pound Note
Katharine M. Briggs heard this anecdote from a friend from London, Percy Robertson, in 1912 in Perthshire. Baughman assigns it Motif N360(a), on the basis of a newspaper story in the Indianapolis Sunday Star, March 3, 1946, “The $50 Bill,” written by Frederick W. Gillett, This Week Magazine, pp. 3–4.
AN ELDERLY BROTHER and sister lived together, and one day the sister wanted to go to town to do some shopping. So her brother gave her a five-pound note, and she set out. She traveled third class, and the only other passenger was a shabby old woman who sat opposite her and nodded. Miss M. . . . was sleepy too, after her early, hurried start, so she dozed a little too. Then she woke up, and thought it wasn’t very safe to go to sleep in a railway carriage, alone with a stranger. She opened her bag to make some notes of what she had to buy, and the five-pound note wasn’t there. She looked at her neighbor, who was sleeping heavily with a big old shabby bag beside her. Miss M. . . . bent forward and, very cautiously, she opened the bag. There was a new five-pound note on top of everything.
“Old scoundrel!” thought Miss M. . . . Then she thought, “She’s poor and old, and I oughtn’t to have put temptation in her way.” She wondered what she ought to do. It would cause a great deal of delay and bother to call the police, and it seemed cruel to get an old woman into trouble, but she must have her money. So, in the end, she quietly took the five pounds out of the bag, and shut it up again.
At the next stop, the old woman got out, and Miss M. . . . got to town and did her day’s shopping, and came home loaded with parcels. Her brother met her at the station. “How did you manage?” he said, “I expected to find you up a gum tree. You left your five-pound note on the dressing-table.”
Part III
Jocular Tales
51
The Curious Cat
Recorded from Ruth L. Tongue, September 28, 1963, as she heard the story from a Hawkridge drover in Somerset in 1945.
This is another legend of Tarr Steps, a set of natural stepping-stones over the River Barle. Mouncey Castle is an earthwork near at hand. Two local sayings seem related to the story: When blame is imminent, “Give it back to the cat”; and when there is an unpleasant job to be done, “Well then, send the cat to have a look-see.”
Type 1191, The Dog on the Bridge, embodies Motif S241.1, “Unwitting bargain with devil evaded by driving dog over bridge first.” In the present text, the cat crosses on her own. Other familiar motifs are K210, “Devil cheated of his promised soul” and G303.9.1.1, “Devil as builder of bridge.”
Conflicts and arguments between a parson and the devil are common in English folk tradition. An example is the repartee of the dauntless minister in William Henderson, Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders (London, 1879), p. 278.
THERE WERE ONCE a curious cat over to Spire, a proper mischievous nuisance that cat were, always poking into anything new. He’d torment they pore liddle mice and birds shocking—just to see what they’d try to do. ’Twere a wonder he didn’t get his whiskers scythed off in hay field and his tail broke to bits on dreshen-floor for he were always right in the way where nobody wanted ’n. But there, he’d bite and scratch and swear till every one wished him Somewhere Else.
One day he went for a walk and he found Mouncey Castle. “Now, who dropped this little lot?” say he. “I must go and see.” Then in the woodside he come on a gurt stone, twelve foot or more, just dropped there, and he knew he were getting nearer. Then he heard yells of rage and off he scuttles to see what ’twas and it were the Devil and Parson, one on each side of the Barle and a new stone bridge atween ’n. “I’ll have a look-see at that,” says Cat and downhill he goes.
Says Parson to Devil, “You shan’t have none of my souls be first step on your bridge. They bain’t goin’ Somewhere Else.”
“You old black crow,” yells Devil.
“If I be a crow,” says Parson, “I bain’t so black as yew!”
And just then puss walk out over onto Tarr Steps to look it over, no matter if he’d been invited or no. The Devil pounced on ’n like a lightning flash—and poor Cat goed Somewhere Else quicker than you could think!
52
The Last Man Hanged
Recorded from Ruth L. Tongue, September 29, 1963. She was told the story by a farmer’s daughter from Cannington near Bridgewater, in Somerset.
Walford was a tinker who committed a murder at the end of the eighteenth century. The gibbet from which his body was hung in irons was at a crossroads on the Quantock Hills; it is still known as Watford’s Gibbet.
In an Irish myth a hanged man complains in the same way, but it is of being thirsty (Motif E422.0.1). The incident is elaborated in literary form by James Stephen, In the Land of Youth (London, 1924), Part I, “The Feast of Samhaim,” pp. 3–128.
ARTER WALFORD were ’anged up there to Dowsboro, there was a lot o’ talk down to the Castle o’ Comfort Inn, and they got to talking, and then they got to drinking zider, and then one vellow getting a bit over-merry, they dared ’en to go up to Walford’s Gibbet. Well, ’twere getting late at night, and being over full o’ zider, ’e said ’e would, and off ’e goes. Well, no sooner be ’e out o’ front door than a couple o’ rascals gets out by back door, and straight up over the ’ill. Laughing to themselves, they come up through the vearn, and the bushes like, till they come to the foot o’ the gibbet, and they ’ided in bushes. And bye and bye they ’ears bootses coming up ’ill, getting a bit slower like, as they comes nearer to where gibbet was, and they chuckles to theirselves, and then boots comes a bit slower, like, and then out o’ the air above ’em comes a voice—“Oh! Idn’t it cold up ’ere! Be yew cold too?”
Well, by the time the vellow with the boots, and they two got down to Castle o’ Comfort, they weren’t cold no more.
53
Dolly and the Duke
Recorded from Ruth L. Tongue, September 30, 1963, as she heard the tradition in the Polden Hills in Somerset from one of “Granfer’s” family (name withheld by request) in 1904 and again in 1935.
Sedgemoor and the Bloody Assizes that followed it made a deep impression in Somerset. The battle of Sedgemoor was fought on the night of July 5, 1685, and, presumably, on that day Monmouth’s ghost was seen. (See the notes to “Marshall’s Elm,” No. 45 in this book.)
Motifs present are E334.5, “Ghost of soldier haunts battlefield”; E585.4, “Revenant revisits earth yearly”; and E581.2, “Dead person rides horse.”
