Dimmit

“ My Billy is out with his boat in the bay. To snare the bright herring for me, And I, with my arms, in the dimmit of day, Will snare the bold son of the sea.”

The following account of the same custom, as practised at Bideford, North Devon, has been communicated to me by J. G. Cooper, Esq., of that town “ The custom appears to have been immediately at the end of the day when the reapers had completed their cutting, usually in the twilight of the autumn evening (‘ in the dimmit ’ : Devonice), for the whole party to gather in a circle, […]

If you choose to carry the girl about in your cart, to Polworthy an' back, 'tis no account o' mine ; nor if you're a mind to waste your time in the dimmit (twilight), hangin' round Gridge's cottage, as I do hear ; but you won't drag me into it, and that's final.

‘Punch 'll mind the door, and bark if any one comes nigh. Then in the dimmits’ (twilight) ‘you can go.’

When she left the Hall she went by the lower path across the park, not by the church and the sea. It was the gloaming of a November afternoon—the " dimmits," as we call it in Cornwall—and "gloaming," as you know, at that time means almost the dark.

'Twas getting on vor the dimmits, and I hitched up the mare and went vore tii the back entrance. As I passed the kitchen winder I seed Albertina sitting there all alone, because 'er master and missus was well-to-do, and sat in the parlour evenings ; and I zim tü go all of a treemor like.

And now, as the evenings were so light, she would have time to walk, perhaps, even so far as Quarry Point, and still get back before the dusk—the ‘dimmits’ as Sarah called it—came.