They did not trouble to wind them round
In a sheet of earth in the dewy ground,
They looted them both for the spoil they found.
But the wind was kind. It wailed aloud
And churned the dust, till it rose a cloud
like a pearly mist, to form a shroud.
And the leaves swooned down to the wind's sweet call
And covered the mother and babe and all,
Till they lay at peace in a soft green pall.
The church still ponders, and wonders when
Those bodies will rise from her graveyard pen,
But she knows they are blessed, those poor dead men,
For they sleep within her Christian fold
Under her consecrated mould,
Where a verse was read, and a prayer was told.
But under the hill, in the leaves somewhere,
Lie a mother and child all stark and bare,
Save only a comb in the coal-black hair—
Yet God will remember they lie out there.
Whilst digging up a hitherto uncultivated bit of garden near the Mendips, a gardener came across the mutilated skeletons of a woman and baby. A comb still decorated the woman's coal-black hair. At the inquest afterwards held upon the skeletons, it was suggested that the woman and her baby were probably refugees from the battle of Sedgemoor.