Three hundred years the Forsters' flocks had grazed
Stillchesters, by the ploughshare never broken,
Till the wanchancy day the word was spoken
That gave the strangers leave to dig, and raised
The dead to trouble us and drive us crazed.

They told us that Stillchesters once had been
A Roman camp, and that the walls yet lay
Beneath the smooth turf buried from the day.
Would God those broken walls still lay unseen
Beneath the kindly turf's unbroken green!

They took us with their talk of fighting men,
Of Spanish cohorts, altars, and rich treasure,
And so I gave them leave to have their pleasure
With my best pasture, little dreaming then
Stillchesters never should know peace again.

It's true my poor old mother tried to warn
Her foolish son, and looked at me sore-frightened,
But when I saw how my young wife's eyes brightened
At their fine words I granted leave. The morn
They cut the turf our only son was born.

Although till then the Forsters had been fair,
And though his mother's hair was yellow too,
And her bright eyes like mine a Northern blue,
The bairn was sallow-skinned and had dark hair,
And looked at us with big black eyes astare.

His mother loved her headstrong gipsy sore,
But he was aye a changeling from that day,
Until he broke her heart and went away
To be a soldier, 'listing for a war
In foreign lands, and never came back more.

Three hundred years the Forsters' flocks had grazed
Stillchesters, till a light word rashly said
Unearthed old quarrels of the ancient dead,
And some black Spaniard's restless spirit raised
To drive the last of all the Forsters crazed—

To drive the last of all the Forsters fey,
Rousing the fighting fever in his blood
Whose sires had all been shepherds since the Flood:
So when my time comes, as it must one day,
Whose flocks shall graze Stillchesters, who can say?