“If you do,” threatened the brown-faced woman solemnly, “I shall most certainly report you to the guard at the next station. It’s agenst the by-laws, and you can be punished for doing it. Punished well. My eldest boy is going on the line when he leaves school, and it stands to reason I know what I’m talking about. So you just dare, that’s all!” They allowed one station to go before beginning, and during the half-minute of rest there chaffed an official until he became scarlet with confusion. On the train re-starting, the three lifted their voices to shrill music, singing a satirical melody with, for last line of the refrain, “Oh, what a jolly place is Engeland.” This was followed by a song that caused the other passengers to gaze steadily at the roof of the compartment; the girls did not conceal their diversion at the sensitive nature of the country mind. “What shall we give ’em next?” asked the eldest girl. “Wait a bit and let me think,” answered the youngest. The women said that by rights Parliament ought to step in. If Parliament once decided that these common, vulgar children were not to be allowed, even once a year, to come down into the country and make themselves a nuisance, then it would be stopped. It only needed that Parliament should say the word. Parliament would have to be spoken to about it. Parliament busied its head concerning a lot of things which did not matter; but here was a subject Parliament might well tackle, and thus earn the grateful thanks of a nation. “Let’s give ’em,” said the youngest, “one of them songs we’ve been learnin’ at school lately. There isn’t room, or else we’d do one of the Morris dances. That’d make ’em open their eyes!” At the first verse the brown-faced woman put down her basket and gave all her attention. As the refrain began she unconsciously nodded her bonnet to the rhythm. “‘Where are you going to, my pretty maid? Where are you going, my honey?’ ‘Going over the hills, kind sir,’ she said, ‘To my father a-mowing the barley!’” “Why, do you know,” she cried, “I ’ent heard that not since—” “Order, there!” commanded the girl imperatively. “Some of you’ll get chucked out if you don’t keep quiet.” The last verse came to the deeply interested compartment: “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.” The women clapped hands. One remembered her grandmother singing it years and years and years ago; another had heard it once and only once, at a Foresters’ fête; a third had always recollected the air, but the words she could not have recalled though you offered her a pension. The London children, touched by the genuine enthusiasm, sang “Blow Away the Morning Dew” and “The Two Magicians.” The audience pressed apples upon them.