"
Another, which, by the way, is in Egton churchyard, ran as follows:
"Life is but a winter's day;
Some breakfast and away,
Others to dinner stop and are full fed,
The oldest man but sups and goes to bed."
He was a genuine old Dalesman of a type passed away. His spirits really
never survived the abolition of the stringed instruments in the western
gallery with its galaxy of village musicians. "I hugged bass fiddle for
many a year," he once told me. Peace be to his memory.
* * * * *
Canon Atkinson tells of his good and harmless but "feckless" parish
clerk and schoolmaster at Danby, whom, when about to take a funeral, he
discovered sitting in the sunny embrasure of the west window, with his
hat on, of course, and comfortably smoking his pipe. The clerk was a
brother of the old vicar of Danby, and they seem to have been a curious
and irreverent pair. The historian of Danby, in his _Forty Years in a
Moorland Parish_, fully describes his first visit to the clerk's school,
and the strange custom of weird singing at funerals to which Mr.
Jenkins alludes.
* * * * *
Another north-country clerk-schoolmaster was obliged to relinquish his
scholastic duties and make way for a certified teacher. One day he heard
the new master tell his pupils: "'A' is an indefinite article.
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