And I have brought a coach and six
To take thee away with me.”
During the same summer, I heard in Castleton this fragment of a story:—
Once upon a time a little girl had a golden ball bought her. One day her parents had gone away, and before going they told her if she lost her ball the magician who gave it her would hang her. After they had gone she began playing with the ball, and, as it happened, it went into a brook at the back of the magician’s house. She cried till she thought she would tell her father she had lost her golden ball. When she met him she began saying:—
Father, father, have you brought my golden ball
Or have you come to set me free,
Or have you come to see me hung
Upon that gallant tree?”
[The same question is repeated to the mother, brother, and sister, and cousins, and last of all to the sweetheart, who says that he has not come to see her hung, and stoops down and kisses her. They were married and happy ever after.][102]
No fewer than eighteen other versions of the ballad here printed have been published.[103] With one exception, these other versions omit the lines about the hangman and the child’s escape from the gallows. But in other respects they substantially agree in the story which they tell. A number of children are playing at ball, when one of them accidentally throws it into a Jew’s garden. The Jew’s daughter entices the boy to come in and fetch the ball. He is then laid on a dressing-board, and stabbed to the heart with a penknife, “like a swine,” or, as four of the versions have it, “like a sheep.” His body is then encased in lead, or in “a quire of tin,” and thrown into a draw-well. His mother goes forth to seek him, when he answers from the well, and bids her make his winding-sheet. The scene is variously laid in “merry Scotland,” in the city of Lincoln, in “Mirryland town,” in “Maitland town,” and in “Merrycock land.”[104] In version F of Prof. Child’s collection the time is “a summer’s morning,” and in version N we are told that the deed was done “on a May, on a Midsummer’s day.”