Students and archæologists, it is true, do their best to preserve some record of the old country traditions and ways which have been so ruthlessly destroyed. How dignified and spiritual was the idea which many of them conveyed! Take, for instance, the old belief which formerly prevailed amongst Norfolk fisher-folk, that deaths mostly occurred at the falling of the tide. From this East Anglian legend was it that Dickens drew his beautiful picture of the death of Barkis. “People can’t die along the coast,” said Mr. Peggotty, “except when the tide’s pretty nigh out. They can’t be born unless it’s pretty nigh in—not properly born till flood. He’s agoing out with the tide—he’s agoing out with the tide.” And so Peggotty and David Copperfield watched by Barkis’s bed till, it being low water, the latter went out with the tide. At rural weddings in some parts of Norfolk it was formerly the custom to strew the path of the happy couple with fern leaves, and to greet them on their exit from church with wedding peals rung on all the handbells of the village, whilst in more remote times an elder sister was by an old custom obliged to dance in a hog’s trough should her younger sister marry before her. Country maidens in Norfolk who were desirous of a swain used also to recite the following spell, “a clover of two”—that is, a piece of clover with but two leaves—being supposed to possess much magical power:— A clover, a clover of two, put in your right shoe, The first young man you meet in field, street, or lane You’ll have him or one of his name. As has been said, the advent of the school board rang the death-knell of rural tradition and legend, and the rustic of to-day considers himself far above any such superstitions. Strange old tales and folklore handed down from long-dead generations have little interest for the villager of to-day, who seems to spend a good part of his time lolling about the village street, and flattening his nose against the shop windows, which seem mostly to be filled with those brilliantly coloured tins of foreign preserved meats and provisions which our ancestors, happily for themselves, never knew. The countryman takes his pleasures more sadly than of yore. His rough old amusements and sports are gone; about the only excitement which penetrates into rural life being furnished by some realistically dished-up tragedy or _cause célèbre_ imbibed through the medium of a halfpenny paper.