“The less you knows of it the better for ’ee. Pray to the Lord every night, young woman, that you may never see it.” “Oh, that is all superstition, Nanny. I should like to see it particularly. I never could understand how it came; though it seems to be clear that it does come. It has only come twice in five hundred years, according to what they say of it. I have heard the old rhyme about it ever--oh, ever since I can remember.” “So have I heered. But they never gets things right now; they be so careless. How have you heered of it, Miss Alice?” “Like this--as near as I can remember:-- “‘When the Woeburn brake the plain, Ill it boded for Lorraine. When the Woeburn came again, Death and dearth it brought Lorraine. If it ever floweth more, Reign of the Lorraines is o’er.’ Did I say it right now, Nanny?” “Yes, child, near enough, leastways. But you haven’t said the last verse at all. “‘Only this can save Lorraine, One must plunge to rescue twain.’” “Why, I never heard those two lines, Nanny?” “Like enough. They never cares to finish anything nowadays. But that there verse belongeth to it, as sure as any of the Psalms of David. I’ve heerd my father say it scores of times, and he had it from his grandfather. Sit you down on the stone, child, a minute, while I go in and start the fire up. Scarcely a bit of wood fit to burn round any of the hedges now, they thieving children goes everywhere. Makes my poor back stiff, it doth, to get enow to boil a cow’s foot or a rind of bakkon.” Old Nanny had her own good reasons for not wanting Alice in her cottage just then. Because she was going to have for dinner a rind of bacon truly, but also as companion thereto a nice young rabbit with onion sauce; a rabbit, fee-simple whereof was legally vested in Sir Roland Lorraine. But Bottler, the pigman, took seizin thereof, _vi et armis_, and conveyed it _habendum, coquendum, et vorandum_, to Mrs. Nanny Stilgoe, in payment for a pig-charm.