:
The rhyme was lame, and dull the joke,--
But it tickled the ears of clownish folk.

The Gosherd's Song.

'Tis a tale of merry Lincolnshire
I've heard my grannam tell;
And I'll tell it to you, my masters, here,
An' it likes you all, full well.

A Gosherd on Croyland fen, one day,
Awoke, in haste, from slumber;
And on counting his geese, to his sad dismay,
He found there lacked one of the number.

O the Gosherd looked west, and he looked east,
And he looked before and behind him;
And his eye from north to south he cast
For the gander--but couldn't find him!

So the Gosherd he drave his geese to the cote,
And began, forthwith, to wander
Over the marshy wild remote,
In search of the old stray gander.

O the Gosherd he wandered till twilight gray
Was throwing its mists around him;
But the gander seemed farther and farther astray--
For the Gosherd had not yet found him.

So the Gosherd, foredeeming his search in vain,
Resolved no farther to wander;
But to Croyland he turned him, in dudgeon, again,
Sore fretting at heart for the gander.

Thus he footed the fens so dreary and dern,
While his brain, like the sky, was dark'ning;
And with dread to the scream o' the startled hern
And the bittern's boom he was heark'ning.

But when the Gosherd the church-yard reached,--
Forefearing the dead would be waking,--
Like a craven upon the sward he stretched,
And could travel no farther for quaking!

And there the Gosherd lay through the night,
Not daring to rise and go further:
For, in sooth, the Gosherd beheld a sight
That frighted him more than murther!

From the old church clock the midnight hour
In hollow tones was pealing,
When a slim white ghost to the church porch door
Seemed up the footpath stealing!

Stark staring upon the sward lay the clown,
And his heart went "pitter patter,"--
Till the ghost in the clay-cold grave sunk down,--
When he felt in a twitter-twatter!

Soon--stretching aloft its long white arms--
From the grave the ghost was peeping!--
Cried the Gosherd, "Our Lady defend me from harms,
And Saint Guthlacke[15] have me in his keeping!"

The white ghost hissed!--the Gosherd swooned!
In the morn,--on the truth 'tis no slander,--
Near the church porch door a new grave he found,
And, therein, the white ghost--his stray gander!