In a story called “The Three Golden Balls,” reported from Romsey, in Hampshire,[105] three girls called Pepper, Salt, and Mustard have each of them a golden ball. They play with the balls, and Pepper loses hers. Her mother is angry, and Pepper is hung on the gallows-tree. Next day her father goes to her, and she says:— [105] _Folk-lore_, vol. vi., p. 306. “Oh, father have you found my ball, Or have you _paid my fee_, Or have you come to take me down From this old gallows tree?” This Hampshire version is much degraded, but it mentions _three girls_, and is also important as showing that the one who was chosen for sacrifice might be ransomed, as in the Derbyshire version, and so escape death, if her father or her sisters would pay the proper fee. They refuse, however, and the girl is redeemed by her sweetheart. In this respect the Hampshire story resembles the Derbyshire metrical version, in which the child is at last “bought free.” I shall refer to the subject of redemption further on. The concluding part of the Derbyshire version appears at first sight to be inconsistent with the first part, inasmuch as the child’s death seems to have been caused both by stabbing with a knife and by suspension on a gallows. The version, however, is quite consistent with itself, for the child was first stabbed and then suspended with the head downwards. At the present day an English butcher who is about to kill a sheep lays it on a trestle. He then sticks a knife into the jugular vein, and leaves the sheep for a short time on the trestle until it is quite dead. Afterwards he skins and dresses it, and then he passes a piece of wood through the sinews of the hind legs. From this piece of wood it is hung, by means of a hook, head downwards from a transverse bar. In former times a transverse wooden bar appears to have been used instead of an iron bar, and to have been called the “gallows-tree” (the gallows being the two upright posts), just as the transverse bar from which the cauldron was hung in the kitchens of old houses was called the “galley-balk.” On turning to the word “gallows” in the _New English Dictionary_, I find three quotations from modern books, in which slaughtered sheep or cattle are described as being hung on the gallows. The first is from Lady Barker’s _Station Life in New Zealand_, 1866 (x. 64), in which the gallows is described as “a high wooden frame from which the carcasses of the butchered sheep dangle.” The third is from Boldrewood’s _Colonial Reformer_, 1891, p. 350, where the “gallows” of the colonists is described as “a rough, rude contrivance consisting of two uprights and a cross-piece for elevating slaughtered cattle.” One can hardly doubt that these colonists were adopting a practice once followed in the mother country, and, accordingly, the apparent inconsistency between the concluding part of the Derbyshire version and the first part of that version disappears. The child was