"Now t' lass was taken to York to be hanged. She was brought out on t' scaffold, and t' hangman said, Now, lass, tha must hang by t' neck till tha be'st dead. But she cried out, Stop, stop," etc., stanzas 1-3.
"Then the hangman said. Now, lass, say thy prayers, for tha must dee." Stanzas 4-6 follow. The maid thinks she sees her brother coming, her sister, uncle, aunt, cousin. The hangman then says, "I wee-nt stop no longer, tha's making gam of me. Tha must be hung at once. But now she saw her sweetheart coming through the crowd, and he had over head i t' air her own golden ball. So she said," as in stanzas 7-9.
b.
Miss Kate Thompson, of Newcastle-on-Tyne, had when a child frequently been told the story of The Golden Ball by a woman who was a native of the Borderland. A rich lady possessed a golden ball, which she held in high esteem. A poor girl, her servant, had to clean this ball every day, and it was death to lose it. One day when she was cleaning the ball near a stream it disappeared. The girl was condemned to die, and had mounted the scaffold. The story was all in prose up to the execution, when the narrator broke into rhyme:
'Stop the rope! stop the rope!
For here I see my mother coming.
'Oh mother, have you brought the golden ball,
And come to set me free?
Or are you only here to see me die,
Upon the high, high gallows-tree?'
The mother answers that she has only come to see her die. Other relatives follow, and last of all comes the lover, who produces the ball, and the execution is stopped. Miss Thompson adds that two Northumbrian servants in her house remember the story so.
FOOTNOTES:
[154] Liebrecht was the first to call attention to this ballad-cycle, Zur Volkskunde, p. 222, repeating, with enlargement, an article in Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, IX, 53. He gives the Sicilian text, and a Balearic and a Färöe, presently to be noticed, with translations, and points out other parallels. Reifferscheid made additions in his Westfälische Volkslieder, p. 10, p. 138 ff. I have not at hand the Effemeridi for 1874.
[155] "Legen kan nu fortsættes videre" might imply that the ballad was used as a game; but it is presumable that the author would have been explicit, had he meant this.