But she declared she didn’t know for certain, “but most-like he was some bad bold man who lived in the hills, and took off any maid he had a mind to.”
“Go on, go on!” cried the children enthusiastically, and clapped Nana vociferously.
“You know them all,” exclaimed Bess, “although you like pretending; but nurses always do.”
At this Nana, for all her head of snow, fell a laughing. She forgot all about “bedtime,” and stood before us with pink cheeks, whilst she exclaimed—
“They comes back! They comes back, the old plays.” And therewith begins to repeat “Here comes Three Dukes a Riding.” “Us used to play that—and a right pretty game it was,” she explained,—“on the village green, when the leaves were budding, betwixt the hours of school.”
And she recited aloud in her dear, funny, old cracked voice—
“‘Here comes three dukes a riding
With a ransome, dansome, day.’
“Then the lasses used to answer,” she told us, “and cry out—
“‘And what is your intent, sirs, intent, sirs?