Yorkshire Oddities, Incidents, and Strange EventsBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
Yorkshire Oddities, Incidents, and Strange Events
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Legends -- England -- Yorkshire; Yorkshire (England) -- Miscellanea
"Aye, aye. Sithere." And he poked two stone bottles out from the embers.
"I do it to clear my voice," said the hermit. "Now thou shalt hear my
four voices." He then got up, set his face to the crag, and began a
wonderful performance of four voices--treble, alto, tenor, and bass. He
said he had picked up his "four voices" by listening to the choir in
Leeds parish church. He usually sang sacred hymns, such as "While
shepherds watched their flocks by night," "Christians, awake," and the
Old Hundredth. He went about the country in winter, singing in four
parts for money, and his performance was sufficiently remarkable for him
to be brought to perform in public at the theatre at Leeds, and in the
Headingly Gardens and the Woolsorters' Gardens at Bradford, where he
stayed for weeks at a time. He would sleep in any outbuilding or
blacksmith's shop; indeed, he was so dirty that few people would like to
have given him a bed in their houses.
He used to walk leaning on two rough sticks, wearing a pair of heavy
wooden clogs on his feet, stuffed with hay, his legs bandaged with
straw. His coat was of many colours and much patched; his trousers were
to match. He wore no braces, but kept his trousers in position with a
hempen belt, part of an old horse-girth, which he buckled round his
body. A bag on his back was fastened at the front to his belt. His head
was adorned with a hat of the most antique shape, without a brim, and
stitched together with hemp-string.
The condition of his skin, which had not seen water for years, need not
be described. His hair, once jetty black, now hung in heavy clotted
locks on his shoulders. His eyebrows were black and prominent; his eyes
low-set and watery. He wore a coarse beard, grizzled with age, and very
dirty. From his hat depended a tobacco-pipe, hung by a string.
"Never," he would say to his visitors, "never take to nowt, but whenever
you can get a penny, felt (hide) it, and let nobody know about it, and
then they cannot get it from you. Get all the brass ye can, and as soon
as ye can buy a bit o' grund like this o' mine, ye see, set it with
potatoes, and it'll keep ye. There'll be a peck or two to spare; ye can
sell them, and so ha' brass agean. Are ye married?" said the hermit to a
young man who went to see him.
"No," answered the visitor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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