woman complained not long ago to my informant of the ill-temper of the cuckoo keeper, who had only let one bird fly out of her apron, “and that ’ere bird is nothing to call a singer.”
The Yorkshire farmers are not above taking a practical hint from the early or late arrival of the cuckoo, Their adage on the subject runs thus:
When cuckoo calls on the bare thorn,
Sell your cow and buy your corn.
St. Valentine’s Eve has an observance of its own in the South of Scotland. The young people assemble and write the names of their acquaintances on slips of paper, placing those of the lads and lasses in separate bags apart. The maidens draw from the former, the young men from the latter, three times in succession, returning the names after the first and second times of drawing. If one person takes out the same name three times consecutively, it is without fail that of the future husband or wife. Thus, in Burns’s song of Tam Glen the maiden sings:
Yestreen at the Valentine dealing,
My heart to my mon gi’ed a sten,
For thrice I drew ane without failing,
An’ thrice it was written, Tam Glen.
In a Buckinghamshire village, to the present day, the boys go round for halfpence to every house, singing:
Good morrow to you, Valentine,
First ’tis yours and then ’tis mine,
I’ll thank you for a Valentine.
Old people presage the weather of the coming season by that of the last three days of March, which they call the “borrowing days,” and thus rhyme about:
March borrowed from April
Three days and they were ill;
The first o’ them war wind an’ weet,
The next o’ them war snaw an’ sleet,
The last o’ them war wind an’ rain,
Which gaed the silly puir ewes come toddling hame.
