Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/39

Rh I reached the tree unheard or unheeded, for the soft soil returned no sound to my foot; and on the sunward side I found a woman seated on the grass. She seemed bordering on seventy years of age, with an unbent and unbroken frame, a look of lady-like stateliness, and an eye of that sweet and shining hazel colour of which neither age nor sorrow had been able to dim the glance. Her mantle, once green, and garnished with flowers of gold thread at the extremities, lay folded at her feet, together with a broad flat straw hat—an article of dress common seventy or eighty years ago—and a long staff worn smooth as horn by daily employment. Her hair, nut-brown and remarkably long in her youth, was now become as white as December's snow, and its profusion had also yielded, like its colour, to time; for it hung, or rather flowed, over her shoulders in solitary ringlets, and scarcely afforded a minute's employment to her fingers; which seemed to have been once well acquainted with arranging in all its beauty one of Nature's finest ornaments. As she disposed of each tress, she accompanied the motion of her hands with the verse of a legendary ballad, which she chanted, unconscious of my presence, and which probably related to an adventure of her ancestors:

On the holly tree sat a raven black,

And at its foot a lady fair

Sat singing of sorrow, and shedding down

The tresses of her nut-brown hair:

And aye as that fair dame's voice awoke,

The raven broke in with a chorusing croak:

The steeds they are saddled on Derwent banks;

The banners are streaming so broad and free;

The sharp sword sits at each Selby's side,

And all to be dyed for the love of me:

And I maun give this lily-white hand

To him who wields the wightest brand:

She coost her mantle of satin so fine,

She kilted her gown of the deep sea-green,

She wound her locks round her brow, and flew

Where the swords were glimmering sharp and sheen:

As she flew, the trumpet awoke with a clang,

And the sharp blades smote, and the bowstrings sang.