Chapter XIV
“Such is the custom of Branksome Hall.”
Lay of the Last Minstrel.
NECK-OR-NOTHING HALL
Canto I
Ten good nights and ten good days
It would take to tell thy ways,
Various, many, and amazing:
Neck-or-Nothing bangs all praising.
Wonders great and wonders small
Are found in Neck-or-Nothing Hall.
Racing rascals of ten a twain,
Who care not a rush for hail nor rain,
Messages swiftly to go or to come,
Or duck a taxman or harry a bum,7
Or “clip a server,”8 did blithely lie
In the stable parlour next to the sky9
Dinners, save chance ones, seldom had they,
Unless they could nibble their beds of hay;
But the less they got, they were hardier all—
’T was the custom of Neck-or-Nothing Hall.
One lord there sat in that terrible hall,
Two ladies came at his terrible call,—
One his mother and one his wife,
Each afraid of her separate life;
Three girls who trembled—four boys who shook
Five times a day at his lowering look,
Six blunderbuses in goodly show,
Seven horse-pistols were ranged below,
Eight domestics, great and small,
In idlesse did nothing but curse them all;
Nine state beds, where no one slept—
Ten for family use were kept;
Dogs eleven with bums to make free,
With a bold thirteen10 in the treasury—
(Such its numerical strength, I guess
It can’t be more, but it may be less).
Tar-barrels new and feathers old
Are ready, I trow, for the caitiff bold
Who dares to invade
The stormy shade
Of the grim O’Grade,
In his hunting hold.
When the iron tongue of the old gate bell
Doth summon the growling grooms from cell,
Through cranny and crook
They peer and they look,
With guns to send the intruders to heaven.11
But when passwords pass
That might “serve a mass,”12
Then bars are drawn and chains let fall,
And you get into Neck-or-Nothing Hall.