The Suffolk Miracle- Morse (ME) pre1929 Barry
[Fragment from BRITISH BALLADS FROM MAINE; Barry, Eckstorm and Smyth, 1929. Barry's notes follow.
R. Matteson 2013]
THE SUFFOLK MIRACLE (Child 272)
Mrs. Fred W. Morse of Islesford said that she often used to hear this song sung in her old home in Waterford, Ireland. She was unable to recall more than a few lines of the song but she remembered the story. "A father sent his daughter to England to school. A young man vowed to get her, dead. or alive. Her father had told her not to return until he sent for her. One moonlight night she looked out of her window and saw the young man. she knew him, as he was riding her father's horse and had on her mother's cloak. He rode across the courtyard and knocked. She wondered why he knocked. He had a holland handkerchief around his head, and he said, 'Mevelleia asthore (Irish: Mo Molli a stoir,- that is, Molly, my treasure), how my head does ache!' "
And then she came to her father's hall,
"Father, father," she loudly called;
"O father, did you send for me
By such a messenger?"- naming he.
And the father, knowing this young man being dead,
Every hair stood on his head;
He wrung his hands and he cried full sore,
And this young man's darling cried more and more.
With spades and shovels they dug his clay,
And, although this young man was three weeks dead
There was a holland handkerchief wound round his head.
Mrs. Morse said she used to know a man named Quinlan, in this country, who sang the song, and. Mrs. Lyman Harper of Southwest Harbor said, August, 1927, that she used to hear it sung. on being told the story she recognized it immediately.
Cox gives a version in ten stanzas, and of these Mrs. Morse recognized the second to the sixth inclusive as carrying the story. Campbell and Sharp, A- and B, texts have the handkerchief, which has dropped out of Cox's, but these southern forms lack the lines Mrs. Morse has given.