he market, all on a market-day,
And she fell asleep on the king's highway.
There came by a pedlar, whose name was Stout,
He cut her petticoats round about;
He cut her petticoats up to the knees,
Which made the old woman to shiver and freeze.
When this old woman first did wake,
She began to shiver, and she began to shake;
She began to wonder, and she began to cry--
"Lawkamercyme, this is none of I!"
"But if it be I, as I do hope it be,
I've a little dog at home, and he'll know me;
If it be I, he'll wag his little tail,
And if it be not I, he'll loudly bark and wail."
Home went the little woman, all in the dark;
Up got the little dog, and he began to bark;
He began to bark, so she began to cry--
"Lawkamercyme, this is none of I!"
Tattercoats
In a great Palace by the sea there once dwelt a very rich old lord, who
had neither wife nor children living, only one little granddaughter,
whose face he had never seen in all her life. He hated her bitterly,
because at her birth his favourite daughter died; and when the old nurse
brought him the baby, he swore, that it might live or die as it liked,
but he would never look on its face as long as it lived.
So he turned his back, and sat by his window looking out over the sea,
and weeping great tears for his lost daughter, till his white hair and
beard grew down over his shoulders and twined round his chair and crept
into the chinks of the floor, and his tears, dropping on to the
window-ledge, wore a channel through the stone, and ran away in a little
river to the great sea. And, meanwhile, his granddaughter grew up with
no one to care for her, or clothe her; only the old nurse, when no one
was by, would sometimes give her a dish of scraps from the kitchen, or a
torn petticoat from the rag-bag; while the other servants of the Palace
would drive her from the house with blows and mocking words, calling
her "Tattercoats," and pointing at her bare feet and shoulders, till she
ran away crying, to hide among the bushes.
And so she grew up, with little to eat or wear, spending her days in the
fields and lanes, with only the gooseherd for a companion, who would
play to her so merrily on his little pipe, when she was hungry, or cold,
or tired, that she forgot all her troubles, and fell to dancing, with
his flock of noisy geese for partners.
But, one day, people told each other th
|