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WitH THE STORY TELLERS

As I was sad some thought me mad,
I had a little and ought be glad;
I didn’t fare one half as bad
As my neighbor Shawn the Bear.
His courage, who could help admire?
'Twas dead of winter and what fire
Lit up his hearth, about to expire;
Nor food nor fuel was there.

Shawn had endured much poverty,

When a hawthorn bush he chanced to see,

In a lonely gap in Rosnaree
That bordered Chadwick’s lawn.

A lot of firewood it would make,

So that big bush he starts to take,

But Chadwick’s ghost began to shake
And pull it back from Shawn.

Now Shawn the Bear was a daring man,
But when this Tug o’ War began,
From Chadwick’s ghost away he ran

In famishing forty-eight;
But balked in the bush, he stole a sheep,
And though with hunger his children weep,
One quarter barely would he keep,

The rest the neighbors ate.

While his starving neighbors were feeling gay,
The herd to his master hastes to say:
“Faith one of your sheep they stole away;

To that I am willing to swear.
Go search every house the parish round,
Where’er that sheepskin will be found,
He’ll hang as high as the wall of the pound,

I solemnly do declare.

A warrant he took to search each cot,

And certainly he searched a lot;

But not a trace in them he got,
They hadn’t touched a hair

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