A trooper comes to the house of his mistress in the evening and is kindly received. They pass the night together and are wakened by the trumpet. He must leave her; she follows him some way, he begging her to turn back. She asks him repeatedly when they are to meet again and marry. He answers, when cockle shells grow siller bells, when fishes fly and seas gang dry, etc.: see I, 168, 437.
There are several other ballads of a trooper and a maid (Peggy). In 'The Bonnie Lass o Fyvie,' Christie, I, 276, Murison Manuscript, p. 50, Kinloch Manuscripts, VII, 339, Buchan Manuscripts, II, 270, 'Irish Dragoons,' Motherwell's Manuscripts, p. 428, a captain falls in love with a Peggy and dies thereof; but in another copy, 'Pretty Peggy,' Gibb Manuscript, No 13, p. 53, all is made to end well. A dragoon very constant and liberal to Peggy, and she very fond to him, are happily married in 'The Dragoon and Peggy,' Maidment, Scotish Ballads and Songs, 1859, p. 98, from a Glasgow copy of the date 1800. The first half of this ballad is found under the title of 'The Laird of Kellary ' in Kinloch Manuscripts, I, 359. In an English broadside which is perhaps of the first half of the seventeenth century, a married Peggy leaves her husband to follow a soldier over sea, but returns and is forgiven: 'The Soldier and Peggy,' Roxburghe collection, I, 370 (also Pepys, Euing, Douce), Chappell, The Roxburghe Ballads, II, 475. 'Peggie is over the sie with the souldier ' is the title of a tune (No 95) in the Skene Manuscripts, which date from the first quarter of the seventeenth century. A correspondent of C.K. Sharpe sent him one stanza of a Scottish ballad upon this theme:
There is also a ballad of a valiant trooper and a pretty Peggy who, at first inconstant, turns out a loving wife, in Pepys, IV, 40, No 37.
A is translated by Gerhard, p. 189.
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