muster-days

Updated: May 31, 2025

Here were the muster-days of wartime. Here on Saturdays the people had come together during half a century for sport and horse-trading and to talk politics. Here they drank apple-jack and hard cider, chaffed and quarrelled and fought fist and skull. Here the bullies of the two counties would come together to decide who was the "best man."

John Fox - The Trail of the Lonesome Pine

I gave one of them, the other day, a silver fourpence, which fell into the vitals of the instrument, and compelled the man to take it to pieces. At Rock Ferry there was a great throng, forming a scene not unlike one of our muster-days or a Fourth of July, and there were bands of music and banners, and small processions after them, and a school of charity children, I believe, enjoying a festival.

Nathaniel Hawthorne - Passages from the English Notebooks, Complete

With the exception of some twenty cows and calves usually kept about the house, to give milk, which are called the milking herd, the grazier sees nothing of his herds but on muster-days, which occur twice a year.

G. F. Davidson - Trade and Travel in the Far East: or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java,: Singapore, Australia and China.

I gave one of them, the other day, a silver fourpence, which fell into the vitals of the instrument, and compelled the man to take it to pieces. At Rock Ferry there was a great throng, forming a scene not unlike one of our muster-days or a Fourth of July, and there were bands of music and banners, and small processions after them, and a school of charity children, I believe, enjoying a festival.

Nathaniel Hawthorne - Passages from the English Notebooks, Volume 1.