lucky bird," and unless great misfortune is courted some small coin must
be given to that boy. On New Year's Day the same process applies to girls,
but they have no particular designation. Badger-baiting in the castle is
still remembered, but at the present time lawn-tennis is the only game
that is played there. This brings one to the everyday facts of Pickering
life, which may sound almost too prosaic for any record, but taken in
contrast with the conditions of life that have gone before they are the
most recent page of that history which continues to be made day by day in
the town.

The Pickeronian can no longer call himself remote in the sense of
communication with the rest of the world, for the North-Eastern Railway
takes him to York in little more than an hour, and from that great station
he can choose his route to London and other centres by the Great Northern,
the Great Central, or by the Midland Railway, and he can return from
King's Cross to Pickering in about five hours. But this ease of
communication seems to have made less impression upon the manners and
customs of the town and neighbourhood than might have been imagined. It
may perhaps show itself in the more rapid importation from London of a
popular street tune or in the fashions of dress among the women-kind, but
there are still great differences in the ways of living of the country
folk and in the relations of squire and peasant.

Superstitions still linger among the moorland folk, and the custom of
placing a plate of salt upon the breast of one who is dying is still
continued here and there in a covert fashion. Clocks are still stopped,
fires raked out, and looking-glasses turned to the wall at the moment of
death, but such acts of deference to the world of fancy are naturally only
seen by those who have intimate experience of the cottage life of these
parts, and the casual visitor sees no traces of them.

The town at one time had a newspaper of its own. It was known as the
_Pickering Mercury_, and was started in the summer of 1857; but it perhaps
found Scarborough competition too much for it, for now it is almost
forgotten, and an evening paper produced in the big watering-place is
shouted round the streets of the town every night.

The changes that the present century may witness will possibly work
greater transformations than any that have gone before, and not many years
hence this book will no doubt be described as belonging to the rough and
rea