pend,
My guilders shall keep you free.

"And though your guilders should keep me free,
Yet I cannot do your will;
Far, far o'er the hills and away I must go,
Sweet sweetheart, then think of me still.

"Far over the hills and away when I came,
Sweet sweetheart, she open'd the door;
She laugh'd not, she spoke not, she welcomed me not:
It seem'd that she knew me no more.

"There's never an apple so white and so red
But the kernels are black at its core;
There's never a maid in all Wurtemberg
But plays false when you watch her no more."

Pop! went the report of a fowling-piece. The girls started: the finch
flew away from the cherry-tree. Looking round, they saw the gamekeeper
of Muehringen run into a field of rape-seed, with his dog before him.
He picked up a heron, pulled out one of its feathers and fixed it in
his hat, thrust the bird into his pouch, and hung his gun upon his
shoulder again: he was a fine-looking fellow as he strode through the
green field.

Tony said, "He might have let the bird alone on Sunday."

"Yes," said Babbett; "the gamekeepers are no good Christians anyhow:
they can do nothing but get poor folks into the workhouse for
trespassing, and kill poor innocent beasts and birds. That green
devil's imp there sent poor Blase's Kitty to prison for four weeks just
the other day. I wouldn't marry a gamekeeper if he were to promise me I
don't know what."

"Old Ursula once told me," said Bridget, the youngest of the three,
"that a gamekeeper is bound to kill a living thing every day of his
life."

"That he can do easy enough," laughed Babbett, catching a gnat which
had settled on her arm.

By this time the gamekeeper came quite near them. As if by a previous
arrangement, they all began to sing again: they wished to pretend that
they did not see the gamekeeper, but in their constraint they could not
raise their voices, and only hummed the last verse of the song:--

"If she plays me false I will play her fair:
Three feathers upon my hat I wear;
And, as she will not have me stay,
I'll travel forth upon my way."

"Girls, how are you?" said the gamekeeper, standing still: "why don't
you sing louder?"

The girls began to giggle, and held their aprons to their mouths.
Babbett found her ton