And it seldom happened that they did not have one "given" them; for nearly every old Breton
grandame has, at least once in her life, seen the "korrigans" dance by moonlight on the heather.
'Twixt doleful songs, tears, and sad elegies, Such as old
grandames, watching by the dead, Are wont to outwear the night with.
I will expound to you -- as I alone can -- the secret of the enginery that effected the Rattleborough miracle -- the one, the true, the admitted, the undisputed, the indisputable miracle, which put a definite end to infidelity among the Rattleburghers and converted to the orthodoxy of the
grandames all the carnal-minded who had ventured to be sceptical before.
We behold aged men and
grandames, a clergyman with the Puritanic stiffness still in his garb and mien, and a red-coated officer of the old French war; and there comes the shop-keeping Pyncheon of a century ago, with the ruffles turned back from his wrists; and there the periwigged and brocaded gentleman of the artist's legend, with the beautiful and pensive Alice, who brings no pride out of her virgin grave.
We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of
grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talents and character they chance to see,--painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered these sayings, they understand them and are willing to let the words go; for at any time they can use words as good when occasion comes.
We thank Les Innes and Felicity Harrison (contract monitors), Francis Sarmiento and Mel
Grandame of the AECB, and Rick Manners of Ontario Hydro for their help in coordinating our field study.
She lays the blame more on Satan, "the father of lies," than on the "
grandame." Bradstreet makes no mention of Eve as seductress, only of
Great
Grandame Wales, from whom those ancestors Descended from whom I (poor I) descend, I owe so much to my progenitors And to thee, for them, that until mine end Thy name and fame I'll honour and defend: Sith joy doth passage to thy speech deny (For that thy Prince thine honor doth commend), Lest that thy silence might be ta'en awry Mine artless pen shall thy tongue's want supply.
In discussing Iseult's choice of storytelling material, the narrator reports: the tales With which this day the children she beguiled She gleaned from Breton
grandames, when a child, In every hut along this sea-coast wild.