From comely Conway unto Clyde Under tyldes[4] them to hide A better shepherd on no side No earthly man may have For with walking weary I have methought Beside thee such my sheep I sought My long-tail'd tups are in my thought Them to save and heal In the _Death of Abel_, another Chester play, Cain comes in with a plough, and says:-- A tiller I am, and so will I be, As my daddy hath taught it me I will fulfil his lore In the subsequent incident of the corn that Cain is to offer for his sacrifice, we hear the plain echo of the English farmer's voice in the corn-market mixing with the scriptural verse: "This standing corn that was eaten by beasts," will do: God, thou gettest no better of me, Be thou never so grim So throughout the plays the folk-life of their day, their customs and customary speech, are for ever emerging from the biblical scene. In trying to realise how the miracle-plays were mounted and acted, we shall find the best witness at Chester. This was a rather late one. Archdeacon Rogers, who saw them in 1594, when they had been going on for something like three centuries in all. From his account (in the _Harleian Miscellany_) it appears the Chester plays were given on Whit-Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. "The manner of these plays were, every company had his pageant or part, a high scaffold with two rooms, a higher and a lower, upon four wheels. In the lower they apparelled themselves, and in the higher room they played, being all open on the top, that all beholders might hear and see them." They were played, he goes on to say, in every street: "They began first at the abbey gates, and when the first pageant was played, it was wheeled to the high cross before the mayor, and so to every street. So every street had a pageant playing before it at one time, till all the pageants for the day appointed were played. When one pageant was near ended, word was brought from street to street, that so they might come in place thereof, exceeding orderly, and all the streets have their pageants before them, all at one time playing together, to see which plays was great resort and also scaffolds and stages made in the streets in those places where they determined to play their pageants." The same writer explains elsewhere that these plays were divided into twenty-four pageants, according to the number of the city companies, and that each company brought out its own pageant.