Three miles north we reach the fine church of _Marsh Chapel_. This was once a hamlet of _Fulstow_, four miles to the west on the road to Ludborough. It is Perpendicular from the foundation. Here, as at Grainthorpe, is a rood screen partly coloured, the lower part being new. The church is seated throughout in oak, and evidently used by a large congregation. The capitals of both arcades are battlemented. On the chancel wall is an exquisite little alabaster tablet put up in 1628, representing Sir Walter Harpham, his wife and little daughter—quite a gem of monumental sculpture. The parents died in 1607 and 1617. The lofty tower has a turret staircase with a spirelet—a rare feature in Lincolnshire, though common in Somersetshire—and the church is all built of Ancaster stone. Going north we reach _North Cotes_ and Tetney lock, where we can see part of the Roman sea bank, though Tetney haven now is almost two miles distant. The Louth river, which is cut straight and turned into the Louth Navigation Canal, runs out here. The by-road we have been following from the south ends here; but a branch running due west passes to _Tetney_ village and thence joins the Louth and Grimsby highway at Holton-le-Clay. CHAPTER XXVII LINCOLNSHIRE FOLKSONG Dan Gunby and The Ballad of the Swan. There is no great quantity of native verse in this county, and children’s songs of any antiquity are by no means so common with us as they are in Northumbria, but there is _The Lincolnshire Poacher_ with its refrain, “For ’tis my delight of a shiny night in the season of the year,” the marching tune of the Lincolnshire Regiment; and there is an old quatrain here and there connected with some town, such as that of Boston, and that is all. It was my luck, however, to know, fifty years ago, a man who wrote genuine ballad verses, some of which I took down from his lips. They have never been printed before, but seem to me to be full of interest, for the man who wrote them was a typical east-coast native, a manifest Dane, as so many of these men are—unusually tall, upright, with long nose and grey eyes, and a most independent, almost proud, bearing. He was a solitary man, and made his living, as his earliest forefathers might have done, by taking fish and wild fowl as best he could; and, for recreation, drinking and singing and playing his beloved fiddle. It seemed as if the runes of his Scandinavian ancestors were in his blood, so ardently did he enjoy music and so strongly, in spite of every difficulty, for he had had little education, did he feel the impulse to put the deeds he admired into verse. [Sidenote: R. L. NETTLESHIP]