“Give him a bucket of dry hot ashes to eat,
      Groom him down with a bezom stick,
      And give him a yard and a half of pump water to drink.”

For these offices he mentions that his fee is fifty guineas, but he will take ten pounds, adding: 

     “I can cure the itchy pitchy,
      Palsy, and the gout;
      Pains within or pains without;
      A broken leg or a broken arm,
      Or a broken limb of any sort. 
      I cured old Mother Roundabout,” etc.

He declares that he is not one of those “quack doctors who go about from house to house telling you more lies in one half-hour than what you can find true in seven years.”

So the knight just come from Turkey-land is resuscitated and sent back to his own country.

Last of all the old woman speaks: 

     “In comes I old Betsy Bub;
      On my shoulder I carry my tub,
      And in my hand a dripping-pan. 
      Don’t you think I’m a jolly old man?

      Now last Christmas my father killed a fat hog,
      And my mother made black-puddings enough to choke a dog,
      And they hung them up with a pudden string
      Till the fat dropped out and the maggots crawled in,” etc.

The mummers’ play, of which the above is a very brief resume, lasts about half an hour, and includes many songs of a topical nature.

Yes, Christmas is Christmas still in the heart of old England.  We are apt to talk of the good old days that are no more, lamenting the customs and country sports that have passed away; but let us not forget that two hundred years hence, when we who are living now will have long passed “that bourne from which no traveller returns,” our descendants, as they sit round their hearths at Yuletide, may in the same way regret the grand old times when good Victoria—­the greatest monarch of all ages—­was Queen of England; those times when during the London season fair ladies and gallant men might be seen on Drawing-room days driving down St James’s Street in grand carriages, drawn by magnificent horses, with servants in cocked hats and wigs and gold lace; when the rural villages of merrie England were cheered throughout the dreary winter months by the sound of horse and hound, and by the sight of beautiful ladies and red-coated sportsmen, mounted on blood horses, careering over the country, clearing hedges and ditches of fabulous height and width; when every man, woman, and child in the village turned out to see the “meet,” and the peer and the peasant were for the day on an equal footing, bound together by an extraordinary devotion to the chase of “that little red rover” which men called the fox—­now, alas! extinct, as the mammoth or the bear, owing to barbed wire and the abolition of the horse; when to such an extent were games and sports a part of our national life that half London flocked to see two elevens of cricketers