'Twixt one another secretly:
I mark their gloze,
And it disclose,
To them whom they have wronged so:
When I have done,
I get me gone,
And leave them scolding, ho, ho, ho!

When men do traps and engines set
In loop-holes, where the vermin creep,
Who from their folds and houses, get
Their ducks and geese, and lambs and sheep;
I spy the gin,
And enter in,
And seem a vermin taken so;
But when they there
Approach me near,
I leap out laughing ho, ho, ho!

By wells and rills, in meadows green,
We nightly dance our heydeguys;
And to our fairy king and queen
We chant our moon-light minstrelsies.
When larks 'gin sing,
Away we fling;
And babes new-born steal as we go,
And elf in bed
We leave instead,
And wend us laughing, ho, ho, ho!

From hag-bred Merlin's time have I
Thus nightly revell'd to and fro:
And for my pranks men call me by
The name of Robin Good-fellow.
Fiends, ghosts, and sprites,
Who haunt the nights,
The hags and goblins do me know;
And beldames old
My feats have told;
So _Vale, Vale_; ho, ho, ho!

_A black-letter broadside, XVIIth cent._

* * * * *

QUEEN MAB

_Satyr_
This is Mab, the mistress fairy,
That doth nightly rob the dairy,
And can hunt or help the churning
As she please without discerning.
. . . . . .
She that pinches country wenches
If they rub not clean their benches,
And with sharper nails remembers
When they rake not up their embers;
But if so they chance to feast her,
In a shoe she drops a tester.
. . . . . .
This is she that empties cradles,
Takes out children, puts in ladles;
Trains forth midwives in their slumber,
With a sieve the holes to number,
And then leads them from her boroughs
Home through ponds and water-furrows.
. . . . . .
She can start our franklins' daughters,
In her sleep, with shrieks and laughters,
And on sweet St. Anna's night
Feed them with a promised sight--
Some of husbands, some of lovers,
Which an empty dream discovers.

BEN JONSON, masque of _A Satyr_ (1603).

* * * * *

A Proper New Ballad, intituled

TH