"What makes you leave your house and land? What makes you leave your money, O? What makes you leave your new wedded lord, To go with the wraggle taggle gipsies, O?" And what says she? She has heard the call of the road: "What care I for my house and my land? What care I for my money, O? What care I for my new wedded lord? I'm off with the wraggle taggle gipsies, O." For the most part, however, these old English songs which we want to see popularized are less intoxicating. Their tunes are not those of the pied piper who would upset the family, but more serene and sweet, like the music of birds by a running stream. And the words are emotion remembered in tranquillity. This exquisite "Mowing the Barley," for example, is as artless a love-ballad as ever was written, in which the least romantic character in English life is transfigured into a hero. A lawyer, in short. I wonder that in the Temple they ever sing anything else, so proud should this ditty make them. It begins: [Illustration: Music fragment] Law-yer he went out one day, A for to take his plea-sure, And who should he spy but some fair pret-ty maid, So hand-some and so clev er? Where [Illustration: Music fragment] are you go-ing to, my pret-ty maid, Where are you go-ing my hon ney? Go-ing o-ver the hills, kind sir, she said, To my fa-ther a-mow-ing the bar ley Rhymes, you see, don't matter much in our kind of song. We hate pedantry; and we hate everything that sets up the slightest obstacle between the singer and the listener. The lawyer said no more that day, but the next he rode forth again, and though at first she gave him the slip (for she thought him like all lawyers, true to type) he Caught her round the middle so small, And on his horse he placed her. The legal courting then began "Hold up your cheeks, my fair pretty maid, Hold up your cheeks, my honey, That I may give you a fair pretty kiss, And a handful of golden money." The fair pretty maid at first refused, for she suspected the honesty of his intentions; but after he had talked a little more, and more ardently, She quite forgot the barley field, And left her father a-mowing. And now--the end is perfect-- And now she is the Lawyer's wife, And dearly the Lawyer loves her; They live in a happy content of life, And well in the station above her. No one who has ever heard a company of fresh young voices lilting out this beautiful piece of rural idealism--for I take it that it is no small thing for a country girl to catch a lawyer, that terrible person who knows everyone's business and arranges for distraints and evictions as well as the making of wills and the lending of money--has ever known music at its very spring.