time, no boy would commit himself to the Wear without the precaution of an eel-skin tied round his left leg to save him from cramp. Well do I remember thus fortifying myself against danger before plunging into the stream. Another of our little superstitions was, that a horsehair kept in water would in due time turn into an eel; and many a time have we tried the experiment, ever attributing its failure to some adventitious circumstance, not to a fallacy in our belief. I am told that this mistake may be traced to the sudden appearance, after rain, of long hair-like worms in the deep holes left in clayey ground by horses’ hoofs. There was no trace of such creatures before the holes were filled with rain-water; and, wondering how they could have arrived there, boys imagined them to be hairs, dropped from the horse’s mane and tail, in course of transition into eels.
An odd expression was connected with the lending a knife among boys for the cutting up of a cake or other dainty. The borrower was asked to give it back laughing, i. e. with some of the good thing it was used to cut.
We had at our school an institution called “cobbing,” which tells of rougher times than ours. A friend and schoolfellow of mine thus describes it:—
“When a cobbing match was called, all the boys rushed forward, and seized the unfortunate object of the match by the hair, repeating these lines:—
All manner of men, under threescore and ten,
Who don’t come to this cobbing match,
Shall be cobbed over and over again;
By the high, by the low, by the wings of the crow—
Salt-fish, regnum, buck, or a doe?
I spare you the details of the tortures named salt-fish and regnum; buck was a rap on the scull with the closed hand—doe a tug at the hair, dragging out many a lock. Those who bore no part in cobbing the victim were liable to be cobbed themselves; so were those who were so unlucky as not to be able to touch the hair of the victim, or who while repeating the verses neglected the prescribed rites, i. e. the standing on one leg, closing one eye, elevating the left thumb, and concealing the teeth.”
