"The Midsummer Assize for this blessed year of grace, 1844, was ushered in at a singular conjuncture. The bells rung for the entrance of my lords the queen's judges, on Tuesday afternoon, but people were in a strange state of perplexity as they anticipated some such joyous announcement to signalize the advent of a blessed scion of the royal family of England expected by steam and electric telegraph, to gladden the hearts of once merry England.
"Notices had been very industriously published stating how it was that the Queen was hourly expected to tender an additional proof of her generous determination to extend the line of the House of Brunswick; that Mrs. Lilly the nurse and Dr. Locock, the chief accoucher, with a host of attendants were all quartered at Windsor, whilst the electriic telegraph was waiting for a start to call the cabinet ministers to the scene of the royal birth-bed; the grooms sleeping in their saddles, ready to fly hither and thither with the intelligence as soon as the first premonitory symptoms announced the incipient stages of the royal progress.
"Well we were all thinking that if the young scion missed this world, it would not be for want of guides and directing posts, when the bells struck out and the people rushed forth into the streets, expecting to find the news running abroad that her Majesty was still expounding that important text of Genesis - which holds barreness to be an opprobrium, and sterility contrary to the holy end of matrimony.
''What ever is it? - a buy or a chield.' was the univeral exclamation, as the anxious housewives rushed forth. Alas! there is no satisfactory resonse - 'it idden come yet' is the reply; 'they'm only the jidges.'
The baby in question was Victoria's fourth child, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh who was born on 6th August 1844. So it was a buy!.
A chield in Scotland is a boy and so, etymologically, is child and childe but the Devonians managed to gender-bend the word.
Source: The Western Times, August 27th 1844.
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