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 CHAPTER XXVII

LINCOLNSHIRE FOLKSONG

Dan Gunby and The Ballad of the Swan.

There is no great quantity of native verse in this county, and children's songs of any antiquity are by no means so common with us as they are in Northumbria, but there is ''The Lincolnshire Poacher'' with its refrain, "For 'tis my delight of a shiny night in the season of the year," the marching tune of the Lincolnshire Regiment; and there is an old quatrain here and there connected with some town, such as that of Boston, and that is all.

It was my luck, however, to know, fifty years ago, a man who wrote genuine ballad verses, some of which I took down from his lips. They have never been printed before, but seem to me to be full of interest, for the man who wrote them was a typical east-coast native, a manifest Dane, as so many of these men are—unusually tall, upright, with long nose and grey eyes, and a most independent, almost proud, bearing. He was a solitary man, and made his living, as his earliest forefathers might have done, by taking fish and wild fowl as best he could; and, for recreation, drinking and singing and playing his beloved fiddle. It seemed as if the runes of his Scandinavian ancestors were in his blood, so ardently did he enjoy music and so strongly, in spite of every difficulty, for he had had little education, did he feel the impulse to put the deeds he admired into verse.

It is something to be thankful for that, in spite of railways and Board Schools, original characters are still to be found in Lincolnshire. They were more abundant two generations ago, but they are still to be met with, and one of the most