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ROUND ABOUT RYE 91
Give him a bray, Drive him away, While we all of us sing tick tock."
Balger : " Oh ! Lord ! That is mere tomfoolery ! The man chaunts no-sense stuff as we say in Sussex."
The Tramp (angrily) : " It is nothing of the sort. It is a great charm against the Poor Man which my mother told me, and it is a charm which every child should know and every grown man remember. You must know that the devil, or, as we Sussex people more sympathisingly call him, the Poor Man, wroth at the number of churches which sprang up yearly in the neighbourhood of the Downs, near Brighton, resolved to dig a trench from this point down to the sea, and so to inundate the whole countryside. But as he was toiling by night with assiduous energy, he was descried by an old woman from the cottage window, who held up a candle in a sieve that she might the better comprehend his design, and frightening the devil into the belief that it was the sunrise, he immediately disappeared. When he found out his error his black heart was full of raving passion and he flew away over the hills to Mayfield to tell St. Dunstan how he had been tricked (for he had it in his black heart that |
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