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Updated: April 30, 2025
To rear of these stand Walrave and assistants, silent, with their straw-rope; silent, then anon swift, and in whisper or almost by dumb-show, "Now, then!" After whom the diggers, fascine-men, workers, each in his kind, shall fall to, silently, and dig and work as for life.
For he drank; not socially at the King of Bells, but at home in solitude with a black bottle at his elbow. We felt something like awe for the courage of Archie Passmore, who followed twenty paces behind with his tools and a bundle of spars or straw-rope, or perhaps at the end of a ladder which the two carried between them.
On arriving in Irvine, we went to the shop of Archibald Macrusty, a dealer in iron implements, and I bought from him two swords without hilts, which he sold, wrapt in straw-rope, as scythe-blades, a method of disguise that the ironmongers were obligated to have recourse to at that time, on account of the search now and then made for weapons by the soldiers, ever from the time that Claverhouse came to disarm the people; and when I had bought the two blades we went to Bailie Girvan's shop, which was a nest of a' things, and bought two hilts, without any questions being asked; for the bailie was a discreet man, with a warm heart to the Covenant, and not selling whole swords, but only hilts and hefts, it could not be imputed to him that he was guilty of selling arms to suspected persons.
A short distance from his couch, stood a little army of ricks, between twenty and thirty of them, constructed perfectly smooth and upright and round and large, each with its conical top netted in with straw-rope, and finished off with what the herd-boy called a toupican a neatly tied and trim tuft of the straw with which it was thatched, answering to the stone-ball on the top of a gable.
At Onstmettingen the man who gives the last stroke at threshing "has the Sow"; he is often bound up in a sheaf and dragged by a rope along the ground. And, generally, in Swabia the man who gives the last stroke with the flail is called Sow. He may, however, rid himself of this invidious distinction by passing on to a neighbour the straw-rope, which is the badge of his position as Sow.
He who does give it "gets the Cow," which is a straw figure dressed in an old ragged petticoat, hood, and stockings. It is tied on his back with a straw-rope; his face is blackened, and being bound with straw-ropes to a wheelbarrow he is wheeled round the village. Here, again, we meet with that confusion between the human and animal shape of the corn-spirit which we have noted in other customs.
So he goes to a house and throws the straw-rope into it, crying, "There, I bring you the Sow." All the inmates give chase; and if they catch him they beat him, shut him up for several hours in the pig-sty, and oblige him to take the "Sow" away again.
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