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We are in a noisy corner of the world. Over on the Indiana bottom, a squeaky fiddle is grinding out dance-tunes, hymns and ballads with charming indifference. We thought we detected in a high-pitched "Annie Laurie" the voice of the ferryman's daughter.
James Ballantyne, who was now printer and editor of a weekly paper in his native town. Scott showed him some of his poems, expressed his wonder that his old friend did not try to get some bookseller's printing and suggested a collection of old Border ballads.
She had, not unnaturally, neglected the minor accomplishments. Finding herself inferior to the pretty dolls who played on the piano and made themselves agreeable by singing ballads, she determined to be a musician. Retiring into her former solitude she set to work resolvedly, under the direction of the best master in the town.
Why, even for your own peculiar taste in such matters, where can you find any language so rich in Bacchanalian songs as German?" "I'd rather hear the "Cruiskeen Lawn" or the "Jug of Punch" as my old friend Pat. Samson could sing them, than a score of your high Dutch jawbreakers." "Shame upon ye, Mr. Daly; and for pathos, for true feeling, where is there anything equal to Schiller's ballads?"
He was the only one of the Saxon chieftains who thus closed his days in his native home the only one who had not sought to preserve his own possessions at the expense of his country, and who had broken no oaths nor engagements. His exploits are told in old ballads and half-romantic histories, and it is not safe to believe them implicitly, but his existence and his gallant resistance are certain.
The singers of longer ballads carry about with them sometimes a series of rudely-executed illustrations of different incidents in the story, painted in distemper and pasted on a large pasteboard frame, which is hung against a wall or on a stand planted behind the singer in the ground. These he pauses now and then in his song to explain to the audience, and they are sure to draw a crowd.
When a chief was dying in pain he was mercifully strangled, though the common people were allowed to linger to their end, and his deeds were rehearsed in ballads sung to the drum. There was a belief in ghosts, albeit they could not be seen in the light, unless in a lonely place, nor by many persons.
Thus died of honourable injuries and in the savour of fame Gilbert Elliott of the Cauldstaneslap; but his sons had scarce less glory out of the business. Some century earlier the last of the minstrels might have fashioned the last of the ballads out of that Homeric fight and chase; but the spirit was dead, or had been reincarnated already in Mr.
He knew an endless multitude of ballads, catches, and old-fashioned, jocose little pieces. Most of all pleased Liubka the universally familiar Armenian couplets about Karapet: "Karapet has a buffet, On the buffet's a confet, On the confet's a portret That's the self-same Karapet." Anglice, "confet" is a bon-bon; "portret," a portrait. Trans.
I don't suppose she ever knew all of the words of any of these songs or ballads, she never did any of them quite the same any time, but she caught at the plot and she babbled a scrap or two of the chorus and she always knew every lilting turn of the tunes. There was one "pretend" she could only do when she was alone. She did not try it often.
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