next Shrove can take a wife,
For before next Puck Fair we will have Home Rule,
and then you will be settled down in life.
Now the same advice I give young girls for to get married and have pluck.
Let the landlords see that you defy them when coming to Fair of Puck.

Cead Mile Failte to the Fair of Puck.

When one makes the obvious elisions, the lines are not so irregular
as they look, and are always sung to a measure: yet the whole, in
spite of the assonance, rhymes, and the 'colours grand and gay,'
seems pitifully remote from any good spirit of ballad-making.

Across the square a man and a woman, who had a baby tied on her
back, were singing another ballad on the Russian and Japanese War,
in the curious method of antiphony that is still sometimes heard in
the back streets of Dublin. These are some of the verses

_Man._

Now provisions are rising, 'tis sad for to state,
The flour, tea and sugar, tobacco and meat;
But, God help us I poor Irish, how must we stand the test

_Ambo._

If they only now stop the trade of commerce.

_Woman._