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Updated: May 6, 2025
Some of the people were extraordinarily good, especially one jolly old fellow who talked about English folk songs and dances, and wanted us to set up a Maypole. In the debates which generally followed I began to join, very coyly at first, but presently with some confidence. If my time at Biggleswick did nothing else it taught me to argue on my feet.
It was on one of those mornings, common in early spring, when the year, fickle and changeable in its youth like all other created things, is undecided whether to step backward into winter or forward into summer, and in its uncertainty inclines now to the one and now to the other, and now to both at once wooing summer in the sunshine, and lingering still with winter in the shade it was, in short, on one of those mornings, when it is hot and cold, wet and dry, bright and lowering, sad and cheerful, withering and genial, in the compass of one short hour, that old John Willet, who was dropping asleep over the copper boiler, was roused by the sound of a horse's feet, and glancing out at window, beheld a traveller of goodly promise, checking his bridle at the Maypole door.
The Lord and Lady of the May, though their titles must be laid down at sunset, were really and truly to be partners for the dance of life, beginning the measure that same bright eve. The wreath of roses that hung from the lowest green bough of the Maypole had been twined for them, and would be thrown over both their heads in symbol of their flowery union.
After such a recommendation, one will surely desire to visit the place, and it is pleasant to know that the "delicious old inn" is still standing and that the village is as rural and pretty as when Dickens wrote over sixty years since. The inn referred to, the King's Head, was the prototype of the Maypole in "Barnaby Rudge," and here we were delighted to stop for our belated luncheon.
They both glanced at the subject of this remark, who had taken a seat on the other side of the fire, and, smiling vacantly, was making puzzles on his fingers with a skein of string. 'Pray, tell me, sir, said Varden, dropping his voice still lower, 'exactly what happened last night. I have my reason for inquiring. You left the Maypole, alone?
Giles I've heard call the Royal Family Hanoverian rats," she exclaimed indignantly, "and those German women who pocketted everything they could lay their hands upon the 'Maypole' and the 'Elephant, the one because she's so lean and the other because she's so fat they're rats too. Fancy the King making them into an English duchess and countess. 'Tis monstrous. Why "
And Endicott, the severest Puritan of all who laid the rock-foundation of New England, lifted the wreath of roses from the ruin of the Maypole and threw it with his own gauntleted hand over the heads of the Lord and Lady of the May. It was a deed of prophecy. As the moral gloom of the world overpowers all systematic gayety, even so was their home of wild mirth made desolate amid the sad forest.
In the two volumes, however, of "Twice Told Tales," the second published two years later, the tragical element only appears as an undercurrent of pathos in such stories as "The Gentle Boy," "Wakefield," "The Maypole of Merry-mount," and "The Haunted Mind," but reaches a climax in "The Ambitious Guest" and "Lady Eleanor's Mantle."
Rachel Wiletzky had the colouring and physique of a dairymaid. It was the sort of colouring that you associate in your mind with lush green fields, and Jersey cows, and village maids, in Watteau frocks, balancing brimming pails aloft in the protecting curve of one rounded upraised arm, with perhaps a Maypole dance or so in the background.
Anon he unbent himself somewhat and his eyes twinkled with kindly humour: "Why didn't you bring the Maypole here?" he enquired; "I suppose you thought it would not be as good a 'spec as Badsworth Hall and the London gents eh?" Bob Keeley opened his round eyes very wide. "We be all comin' 'ere, sir!" he burst out: "All on us ever so many on us!
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