A lecture on learning. Astuteness below stairs. A gentleman’s opinion on servants. A horse milliner. Intimacy with Catty. More suspicion of “delicate attentions,” which so far are not quite so criminal as the squire’s.

Perhaps our modern governesses who possess the vain accomplishment of reading and writing, may feel disposed to undervalue the acquirements of our rural Welsh governess. But let them not triumph; and be it recollected that tastes differ, and that many of our living patricians, as well as wealthy plebeians, who are considered the great, the mighty, and the respectable of the land, deprecate with becoming vehemence the prevailing mania for educating the poor. We have heard ladies, and great ones too, attired in silks and velvets, pall and purple, and “faring sumptuously every day,” declare most positively that they never knew a servant good for anything that could read and write.

No sooner were they capable of wielding a goose quill, than the impudent hussies presumed to have a will of their own, and their opinions mounted a step nearer to the attitude of their mistresses. And on men, they said, education had a worse effect, as thereby they became the idle readers of books and newspapers, which made them saucy to their superiors, and sometimes the most villanous cut-throat radicals. Now it will be readily admitted, we should think, that there was little danger of Catty’s scholars ever becoming such pernicious characters; and therefore, let not liberal envy withhold from her the well-merited meed of applause. Alas for the good old times—we see no such school-mistresses now-a-days! those days of the golden age of simplicity are gone for ever.

Perhaps we might wonder that the parents of the children, those who paid such a round sum every week for instruction administered to those “babes and sucklings,” did not grumble at the slow pace at which the process went on. But to criticise a subject properly, we must be “well up” in it, and the villagers of Tregaron were not exactly calculated to measure the amount of “book larning” their babes did, or did not acquire. They were satisfied if their children were “out of the way, the livelong day” and a penny per week was surely not so high a price to pay for that luxury.

Although our hero’s mother could not be called a woman of letters, she certainly possessed qualities more original than generally fell to the lot of persons in her station. At carding wool or spinning it, knitting stockings or mittens, the most envious admitted her superiority to every woman in Tregaron.

She moreover had gained no small consideration in another character, which her jealous neighbours satirically denominated a hedge milliner, whose province it was to mend hedging gloves and coarse frocks for ploughmen, to darn or patch with leather the heels of their stout woollen stockings, and also to repair horse collars at half the price charged by old Daff the saddler; the latter part of her occupation, which required a delicate hand to cut the slender sewing thongs from the raw bull hides, caused her to be called a horse milliner, which, after all, was not much more applicable than if she had been called a bull tailor. This malignant waggery, however, was unable to disturb the tranquil soul of Catty; she loved horses, and in her juvenile days had often whiled away her mornings and evenings in the rural pastime of driving them, both in plough and harrow, while carolling some rural ditty, till the rocks and mountains echoed with the cadence of her harmony.

Catty, with such capabilities and accomplishments, was of course an object of wonder, awe, and admiration, to many of the swains of Tregaron, notwithstanding those “delicate attentions” bestowed upon her by Sir Jno. Wynn, bart., but the success of her original method of tuition made her quite independent of their protestations. But, altering the sex in the quotation, we may say that, “There is a tide in the affairs of women;” and it proved to be so in Catty’s case.

The right man came at last. Like all her amiable sex, she professed the utmost abhorrence of mercenary motives in marriage, though many insinuated that she knew the value of property from having never possessed any worth mentioning. It was observed that she treated with indifference, if not aversion, those unprofitable lovers who had nothing but their goodly persons to recommend them.

Certain innuendoes were even thrown out respecting a suspicion of her coquettings with one of the most ugly, miserly, and repulsive of clowns;—one who was not only a clown, but a red-haired one;—not only knock-kneed, but squint-eyed;—not only squint-eyed, but a woman-hater; and worse than all, a foreigner!—being a native of a distant part of the adjoining county of Carmarthen, and known only by the nick-name of Jack of Sheer GÂr, or Carmarthenshire Jack.

This person was repulsive in the extreme. Clad in old, patched, dirty clothes, with such peculiar facial properties as we have before enumerated, he was apparently the last man upon whom one of the opposite sex would have cast her favouring eye. He was at this time chief husbandman and bailiff to the squire, an office which, giving him power over other servants, we may be very sure did not increase his popularity. But few showed their distaste and aversion openly; it would have been a dangerous experiment with Jack of Sheer GÂr.

The standing jest against him was, his qualifications as a trencherman, and his reputation as a “huge feeder” was certainly unrivalled. As there was not a single pastime under the head of amusement, that the ingenuity of man has ever devised for the entertainment of his fellows, save eating, that possessed a charm for him, it might of course be expected that this solitary recreation would be indulged in the proportion that he excluded all others. He not only performed all the functions of the gross glutton, but as the actors say, “looked the character,” to perfection.

The reader, measuring him by other men, would make a very erroneous guess on the most prominent feature of his face, if he fixed on the nasal protuberance—no such thing—his nose was flat and small, but his large projecting upper teeth, like “rocks of pearl jutting over the sea,” were ever bared for action, white as those of his only companion, the mastiff, and nobly independent of a sheathing lip.

Others more comely features might wear
But Jack was famed for his white teeth bare.

As the squire’s lady was not the most liberal in supplying the servants’ table, those wags, male or female, who were in the habit of committing the silent mimicry against Jack, were soon taught a severe lesson at the expense of their bowels. It was discovered that, whenever enraged at their treatment, instead of spending his breath in vain reproaches, or taking to the more violent proceeding of fisty-cuffs, Jack revenged himself by eating most outrageously, so that scoffers, deprived of their shares, often found their stomachs minus. His power of mastication increased with his anger; and the flaming energy that was mentally inciting him to give an enemy a fierce facer, or a destructive cross-buttock, was diverted from his knuckles to his teeth; and in every quantum which he ground in his relentless mill, he felt the glowing satisfaction of having annihilated a foe.

Woe to those who were his next neighbours at table, and sat so close to his elbows at those hours of excitement; fierce punches in the ribs, as if by accident, were among the slightest consequences; and those who were thus taught the manners to keep a respectable distance, declared that the fears they entertained was only of his knife. But his bloodthirsty propensities were not so great as they were represented to be. Jack believed in the “power of the eye,” and exemplified it, in his own case, by making that organ express what his head never meant to carry out. The squire knew his value as a faithful servant, and turned a deaf ear to all the evil that was reported of him.

Before fanaticism had cast its puritanic gloom over Wales, and identified itself almost with the Welsh in character, mirth and minstrelsy, dance and song, emulative games and rural pastimes were the order of the day; and, as the people worked hard all the week, it must be confessed that these sports often infringed upon the sanctity of the Sabbath.

Sundays were often entirely spent in dancing, wrestling, and kicking the foot-ball. The latter violent exercise, at this time prevalent in Cardiganshire, was performed in large parties of village against village, and parish against parish, when the country brought together its mass of population either to partake in the glories of the game or to enjoy the success of their friends, as spectators. On these occasions Carmarthen Jack loved to be present, but only as a spectator, as he was never known to take a part in the game.

Jack thought the exercise of play was waste of time and breath. He told others that he “kept his breath to cool his flummery, and his strength to make money.” Whilst the others were panting with efforts made in the game, Jack was quietly cutting and carving his wooden spoons, made out of the birch or alder which he stored all the week under his bed, for the purpose of drying it.

At fairs also, Carmarthen Jack would be equally punctual, and after having done his master’s business of buying or selling a horse or so, would be seen with a load of merchandise of his own manufacture, wooden spoons, ladles, and clog soles, in abundance, which drew about him all the rural house-keepers far and near. “No milliner could suit her customers with gloves” in greater variety than Jack with spoons to please his purchasers. He had spoons for man, woman and child, fashioned for every sort of mouth, from the tiny infant’s to the shark-jaws of the hungry ploughman, which, like his own, was said to present a gap from ear to ear. He had spoons for use, and spoons for ornament; the latter, meant to keep company with the showy polished pewter, were made of box or yew, highly polished and curiously carved with divers characters, supposed to be suns, moons, stars, hearts transfixed with the dart of cupid, and sometimes a hen and chickens; with hieroglyphics for fear of their being mistaken for a cat and mice, with other such misconstructions, Jack always explained at the time of bargaining, without any extra charge.

Nothing could more emphatically prove the excellency of Jack’s wares, than the circumstance of his being personally unpopular among the women, and yet his wares in the highest esteem. The frowns of the fair, which threw a gloom on the sunshine of his days, may be traced to a source not at all dishonourable to him. The girls at the squire’s had played him so many tricks, that once in the height of aggravation, Jack waged war against the whole sex, devoting to the infernal gods every creature that wore a petticoat, and vowing, from that day forward, not one of the proscribed race should ever enter his room, which was romantically situated over the stable, its wickered lattice commanding a full view of both the pigsty and the dunghill.

The consequence of this terrible row caused him, at first, some trouble, as, to keep it, he was obliged thenceforward to be his own chambermaid, laundress, and sempstress, offices that accorded ill with his previous habits. The laudable firmness of his nature, however, soon overcame these petty difficulties; and so far was he from backsliding from his previous determination, that he vowed to throw through the window the first woman who entered his chamber, which the satirical hussies called his den—a threat which effectually secured him from further intrusion.

Sometimes, indeed, while sitting at the door of the cow-house, or the stable, listening to the rural sounds of the cackling geese and grunting pigs, and darning his hose, or patching his leather breeches, or treading his shift in the brook by way of washing it, those eternal plagues of his, the girls, would be seen and heard behind the covert of a wall or hedge, smothering their tittering, which at last would burst out, in spite of suppression, into a loud horse-laugh, when, one and all, they would take to their heels, while Jack amused himself by pelting their rear, in their precipitate retreat, with clods of earth, small stones or anything that came in his way.

“Circumstances alter cases.” In time Jack gained the reputation of being rich. He had made spoons to some purpose, and however the fair sex may cry up their disinterestedness, we are all aware that money materially alters the position of a man in their eyes. One of the maids with this knowledge, became very suddenly enamoured of him, and tried to gain his good will. But having one day ventured to Jack’s “sanctum,” the wench was pitched into the dunghill below, and as a consequence the “pangs of despised love” raged in her bosom. The first act of her resentment was to spread about the insidious report that Jack Sheer was a woman-hater—an insinuation that rather preyed upon his mind, as he dreaded the effect such an unmerited stigma would have upon his private trade. But innocence is ever predestined to an ultimate triumph; and an event soon happened that proved the falsehood of those prevalent tales to his discredit, and convinced his greatest foes that he possessed a heart, if not overflowing with human charity, at least penetrable to the blandishments of beauty, and quick with sensibility to female merit.

On one auspicious market-day, Carmarthen Jack appeared in the streets of Tregaron where the market is held, loaded with his usual merchandise, which he spread on the ground, and sat beside them; but not meeting with a ready sale, and disdaining even momentary idleness, began with earnestness to cut and scoop away at a piece of alder, gradually forming it into a huge ladle, to correspond with the largest size three-legged iron pot. On this eventful morning Catty had occasion to perambulate the fair, to purchase a new ladle, her cross-grained sister having broken the old one, by thumping with it on the back of an overgrown hog, whose foraging propensities had led him to investigate the recesses of the schoolroom.

The notoriety occasioned by Jack’s peculiarities, and the fact of his having money, reached the ears of Catty, and our prudent tutor determined to make his acquaintance through the medium of the broken ladle. Some people say that Catty broke the ladle herself, broke it with a design and that design was an excuse for visiting and conquering one who hated all her sex. Be that as it may, she sought and found him in the fair, and fell in love with him and his ladle at the same instant. After an effort to conquer her native bashfulness, and to look as lovely as possible, she accosted him with such uncommon civility as utterly astounded the poor clownish misanthropic bachelor. She examined the ladle in his hand, and though not half finished, declared it to be the handsomest ever her eyes beheld, and paid for it without seeking the least abatement in the price. Jack gaped at her, with open mouth and staring eyes, and thought her a very interesting woman, though his first impression was, that she was mad, as he had asked double the selling price, on purpose to abate one half, according to the custom immemorial in Welsh dealings.

She next purchased half a dozen common birch-wood spoons, and, as many ornamental ones made of box, to adorn her shelf, and, as before paid him his own price. Jack thought her very lovely indeed: and when she made another purchase of a pair of clog soles, quite irresistible!—her ready money opened his heart as the best key in the world would have done a patent lock; and he was almost ready to offer them as a present, but for fear of wounding her delicacy. As she found he had no further variety, she ordered half a dozen more common spoons, and Jack, with all the amiability that he could possibly throw into his hard features, presented her with one of his most finished articles in box. She received it with that peculiar smile with which a lady accepts a welcome love-token, and replied in the softest tone imaginable, “Indeed I will keep it for your sake, John bach!”

Jack had nothing to do but wonder—he never had been called John in his life before; at any other time he would have thought she mocked him—and the endearing term of “bach” too, was equally new to his ears, which seemed to grow longer as they tingled with the grateful sound. This interesting scene was closed by Catty asking him to her house to partake of a dinner of flummery and milk, which he accepted with the best grace imaginable, and trudged off with his wares on his back and dangling from his arms and button-holes; and thus gallanting her in the most amatory style; he walked by her side to Llidiard-y-Fynon.

Unaccustomed to kindness in either word or deed, poor Jack of Sheer GÂr, met her condescensions and advances with a sheepish sort of gratitude. A cordial invitation on the part of Catty to repeat his visit as soon, and as often, as possible, affected him almost to tears; and as a proof of his unbounded confidence, he left in her care his whole stock of ready-made spoons and ladles, and almost blubbered when he shook her hand at parting.

As a proof of the beneficial effect of kindness on a churlish nature, and the contrary, of ridicule and persecution, we need but contrast this rugged man’s previous character and conduct with what followed, after the tenderness of Catty had melted the frost of misanthropy which formed a crusty coat round his heart. The adventure of the day produced a most extraordinary revolution in his habits. None of the servants of the hall, male or female, could conceive what it portended, when Jack asked one of them, his fellow husbandman, to trim his hair; and while the fellow clipped his rough red locks with his sheep-shears, once mischievously pinching his ear with them till he roared, he was surprised at his questions about the price of a new pair of leather breeches, and a red neck-cloth. Greater still was the astonishment of the whole house, when, in a few days after, he appeared changed into a complete rustic buck in those very articles of dress, and while he thought nobody saw him, endeavoured to cut a dancing caper on the green, which they mistook for a frisky bullock. Changes like these are seldom without a reason, thought his fellow servants; and when they saw Jack’s elated steps lead him towards Catty’s house, they jeered, and laughed, and winked; and nothing knew of course, although their knowledge made him all the worse. Tregaron and its neighbourhood had now food for gossip, and gossip to some people is indeed the very acme of human felicity.

Flummery and milk, named here as the food on which those lovers regaled, has been considered in Wales a very popular mess, common, but still a favourite among high and low, and might be seen on the board of the lord lieutenant of county, as well as on that of the humblest cottager. The lofty of the land whose pampered stomachs have turned with loathing from more dainty dishes in sultry seasons, have welcomed the simplicity of milk and flummery, as the advocate of native charms would greet the smilings of a rustic beauty, while the meretricious fair of fashion would be passed by, neglected.

The English reader will not be offended if I dilate a little praise of my favourite bowl or platter, (too much to call it a dish perhaps,) while I explain its nature; and if he be a bloated son of affluence, overflowing with bile and spleen, he will thank us, after adopting our recommendation of feeding on it often during his rustication among our mountains. Our candid sages of the pill and potion, also recommend it as very effective in promoting an increase of good clear healthy blood.

Flummery is made of the inner hulls of ground oats, when sifted from the meal, some of which 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 prince of culinary vessels, the large three-legged iron pot, into a vast earthen dish, it presents a smooth smiling aspect of the most winning equanimity, till destroyed by the numerous invading spoons of the company, who plunge a portion of it, scalding hot, into their bowls of cool milk. Thus much of the descriptive history is given, to illustrate the following ode to 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,
Lov’d 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.