"Madam, I am come to woo,
Marriage I must have of you."
MOUSIE.
"Marriage I will grant you none
Till Uncle Ratton he comes home."
PUDDOCK.
"See, Uncle Ratton's now come in
Then go and bask the bride within."
Who is it that sits next the wall
But Lady Mousie both slim and small?
Who is it that sits next the bride
But Lord Puddock with yellow side?
But soon came Duckie and with her Sir Drake;
Duckie takes Puddock and makes him squeak.
Then came in the old carl cat
With a fiddle on his back:
"Do ye any music lack?"
Puddock he swam down the brook,
Sir Drake he catched him in his fluke.
The cat he pulled Lord Ratton down,
The kittens they did claw his crown.
But Lady Mousie, so slim and small,
Crept into a hole beneath the wall;
"Squeak," quoth she, "I'm out of it all."
The Little Bull-Calf
Centuries of years ago, when almost all this part of the country was
wilderness, there was a little boy, who lived in a poor bit of property
and his father gave him a little bull-calf, and with it he gave him
everything he wanted for it.
But soon after his father died, and his mother got married again to a
man that turned out to be a very vicious step-father, who couldn't abide
the little boy. So at last the step-father said: "If you bring that
bull-calf into this house, I'll kill it." What a villain he was, wasn't
he?
Now this little boy used to go out and feed his bull-calf every day with
barley bread, and when he did so this time, an old man came up to
him--we can guess who that was, eh?--and said to him: "You and your
bull-calf had better go away and seek your fortune."
So he went on and he went on and he went on, as far as I could tell you
till to-morrow night, and he went up to a farmhouse and begged a crust
of bread, and when he got back he broke it in two and gave half of it to
the bull-calf. And he went to another house and begged a bit of cheese
crud, and when he went back he wanted to give half of it to the
bull-calf. "No," says the bull-calf, "I'm going across the field, into
the wild-wood wilderness country, where there'll be tigers, leopards,
wolves, monkeys, and a fiery dragon, and I'll kill them all except the
fiery dragon, and he'll kill me."
The little boy did cry, and said: "Oh, no, my little bull-calf; I hope
he won't kill you."
"Yes, he will," said the little bull-calf, "so you climb up that tree,
so that no one can come nigh you but the monkeys, and if they come the
cheese crud will save you. And when I'm killed, the dragon will go away
for a bit, then you must come down the tree and skin me, and take out my
bladder and blow it out, and it will kill everything you hit with it. So
when the fiery dragon comes back, you hit it with my bladder and cut its
tongue out."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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