Many many years ago I remember to have seen these popular and rustic
rhymes in print,
God made a great man to plough and to sow,
God made a little man to drive away the crow;
they were composed perhaps to make some little man contented with that
office, and certain it is that in all ages and all countries it has
been an object of as much consequence to preserve the seed from birds
when sown, as to sow it. No doubt Adam himself when he was driven to
cultivate the ground felt this, and we who are his lineal descendants
(though I am sorry to say we have not inherited a rood of his estates)
have felt it also, in our small but not unimportant concern, the
Garden. Mrs. L., the Lady of that Garden used to complain grievously
of the depredations committed there, especially upon her pease. Fowls
and Ducks were condemned either to imprisonment for life, or to the
immediate larder for their offences of this kind; but the magpies (my
protegées) and the sparrows, and the blackbirds and the thrushes bade
defiance to the coop and the cook. She tried to fright them away by
feathers fastened upon a string, but birds were no more to be
frightened by feathers than to be caught by chaff. She drest up two
mopsticks; not to be forgotten, because when two youths sent their
straw hats upon leaving Keswick to K. and B., the girls consigned the
hats to these mopsticks and named the figures thus attired in due
honour of the youths, L. N., and C. K. These mopsticks however were
well drest enough to invite thieves from the town,—and too well to
frighten the birds. Something more effectual was wanted, and Mrs. L.
bespoke a man of Joseph Glover.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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