5. Gather me some cherries, they run so in my mind. Then bespoke Joseph, with wordes so unkind, I will not gather cherries. Then said Mary, You shall see, By what will happen, these cherries were for me. 6^1. Then bespoke Jesus. 6^{3, 4}. Go to the tree, Mary, and it shall bow down. 7. And the highest branch shall bow to Mary's knee, And she shall gather cherries, by one, two, and three. 8 _wanting._ 10 _wanting._ 11^3. But in fine. 13^{1, 2}. He never did require white wine and bread. 13^3. But cold spring. 13 _precedes 12._ 14^{3, 4}. Come tell me, dear child, how. 15. This world shall be like the stones in the street, For the sun and the moon shall bow down at my feet. _The rest is wanting._ #D.# 3^2. to the garden school. _The first stanza is said to have this variation in Worcestershire:_ Joseph was a hoary man, and a hoary man was he. _Notes and Queries, Fourth Series, III, 75._ [1] A copy of the Cherry-Tree carol in The Guardian, Dec. 27, 1871, is partly compiled "from several ancient sources," and partly composed by the contributor: see Notes and Queries, Fourth Series, X, 73. [2] Cf. the very naive #D# 5: 'Mary shall have cherries, and Joseph shall have none.' [3] Liber de Infantia Mariæ et Christi Salvatoris, O. Schade, 1869, p. 38 f, follows almost word for word the Pseudo-Matthew. In note 234 the editor points out passages where the story occurs in Hróthsvítha, and other mediæval poetry. See, also, Schade, Narrationes de vita et conversatione beatæ Mariæ Virginis, 1870, pp 16, 24. [4] The same in Christmas and Christmas Carols [by J. F. Russell], p. 26, with an additional modern-sounding stanza. 55 THE CARNAL AND THE CRANE 'The Carnal and the Crane.' #a.# Sandys, Christmas Carols, p. 152, Christmastide, p. 246, from a broadside. #b.# Husk, Songs of the Nativity, p. 97, apparently from a Worcester broadside, #c.# Birmingham chap-book, of about 1843, in B. Harris Cowper's Apocryphal Gospels, p. xli. Mr Husk, who had access to a remarkably good collection of carols, afterwards unfortunately dispersed, had met with no copy of 'The Carnal and the Crane' of earlier date than the middle of the last century. Internal evidence points us much further back. The carol had obviously been transmitted from mouth to mouth before it was fixed in its present incoherent and corrupted form by print.[5]