Course

Another course would have done it. A little more would have effected our purpose. It is said that the peasants of a Yorkshire village tried to wall in a cuckoo in order to en joy an eternal spring. They built a wall round the bird, and the cuckoo just skimmed over it. “Ah!” said one of the peasants, “another carse would aʹ done it.”

“There is a school of moralists who, connecting sundry short-comings … . with changes in manners, endeavour to persuade us that only ‘another carseʹ is wanted to wall in the cuckoo.”—Nineteenth Century, December, 1892, p. 920.

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Entry taken from Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, edited by the Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D. and revised in 1895.