“Well, I puts things down sometimes in the winter evenings like.”
“About your shooting, isn’t it?”
“Yees, moästlins.”
“And you have got tunes to them?”
“Yees. It’s easy to maäke the tunes up o’ the fiddle, but the words is a straänge hard job oftens.”
“Well now, will you let us hear one of them?”
“To be sewer I will,” and he took his fiddle and sat on the gunwale, while we listened to the following:—
It was in the iambic metre—which befits a ballad—with occasional anapæsts.
THE SWAN