“I’m weeping for my true love, my true love, my true love,
I’m weeping for my true love, by the bright shining shore.”
Then the others sing to her—
“Get up and choose a better one, a better one, a better one,
Get up and choose a better one, by the bright shining shore.”
At this, Mary rises, and chooses one of those from the ring, and the two stand in the middle, holding each other’s hands crossed, while the others sing—
“Your true love is a shepherd’s cross, a shepherd’s cross, a shepherd’s cross,
Your true love is a shepherd’s cross, by the bright shining shore.”
So Mary now takes her place in the ring; her true love becomes “poor Mary,” and chooses another lover amidst the same song; and at last, when all have been Marys and true lovers, with resolute faces, they scatter carelessly and forget. Finding some marbles in a roadside crevice, I ask one child to play, but she says that marbles are not played after Good Friday. A white cow rests beside, so much in love with peace that it grazes lying down. On the other side of the road the bacon hisses and smells from a farmhouse whose mountainous thatch makes a cool cave of tranquillity; on the sunny slopes the starlings who have honeycombed the thatch, whistle or creep in with food or straw. Not one path disturbs the unfrequented verdure of the green, though the road winds lazily round it.