A display custom of little girls in an Oxfordshire village in the 1880s. In Lark Rise To Candleford (1945, chapter 9), Flora Thompson describes making ‘a kind of floral sandwich’ by stripping as many brightly coloured petals as possible from flowers, and laying them on a small sheet of glass, with another sheet placed over it. The whole thing would be wrapped in brown paper, ‘in which a little square window was cut, with a flap left hanging to act as a drop-scene’. The device was called a ‘pin-a-sight’; if the girls showed them to adults, they expected to be rewarded with a pin, and recited:
A pin to see a pin-a-sight,
All the ladies dressed in white.
A pin behind and a pin before,
And a pin to knock at the lady's door.
See also POPPY SHOW.
