Fairies -- Juvenile fiction; Fantasy literature; Short stories, English; Siblings -- Juvenile fiction
‘Bunny Lewknor in his sackcloth petticoats burst through the birch scrub
wiping his forehead.
‘We’ve got the stick to rights now! She’ve been a whole hatful o’
trouble. You come an’ ride her home, Mus’ Dan and Miss Una!’
‘They found the proud wood-gang at the foot of the slope, with the log
double-chained on the tug.
‘Cattiwow, what are you going to do with it?’ said Dan, as they straddled
the thin part.
‘She’s going down to Rye to make a keel for a Lowestoft fishin’-boat,
I’ve heard. Hold tight!’
‘Cattiwow cracked his whip, and the great log dipped and tilted, and
leaned and dipped again, exactly like a stately ship upon the high seas.
Frankie’s Trade
Old Horn to All Atlantic said:
(A-hay O! To me O!)
‘Now where did Frankie learn his trade?
For he ran me down with a three-reef mains’le.’
(All round the Horn!)
Atlantic answered: ‘Not from me!
You’d better ask the cold North Sea,
For he ran me down under all plain canvas.’
(All round the Horn!)
The North Sea answered: ‘He’s my man,
For he came to me when he began--
Frankie Drake in an open coaster.
(All round the Sands!)
‘I caught him young and I used him sore,
So you never shall startle Frankie more,
Without capsizing Earth and her waters.
(All round the Sands!)
‘I did not favour him at all,
I made him pull and I made him haul--
And stand his trick with the common sailors.
(All round the Sands!)
‘I froze him stiff and I fogged him blind,
And kicked him home with his road to find
By what he could see of a three-day snow-storm.
(All round the Sands!)
‘I learned him his trade o’ winter nights,
‘Twixt Mardyk Fort and Dunkirk lights
On a five-knot tide with the forts a-firing.
(All round the Sands!)
‘Before his beard began to shoot,
I showed him the length of the Spaniard’s foot--
And I reckon he clapped the boot on it later.
(All round the Sands!)
‘If there’s a risk which you can make
That’s worse than he was used to take
Nigh every week in the way of his business;
(All round the Sands!)
‘If there’s a trick that you can try
Which he hasn’t met in time gone by,
Not once or twice, but ten times over;
(All round the Sands!)
‘If you can teach him aught that’s new,
(A-hay O! To me O!)
I’ll give you Bruges and Niewport too,
And the ten tall churches that stand between ‘em.’
Storm along, my gallant Captains!
(All round the Horn!)
THE TREE OF JUSTICE
The Ballad of Minepit Shaw
About the time that taverns shut
And men can buy no beer,
Two lads went up by the keepers’ hut
To steal Lord Pelham’s deer.
Night and the liquor was in their heads--
They laughed and talked no bounds,
Till they waked the keepers on their beds,
And the keepers loosed the hounds.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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