I that have so many slighted,
  I am at last—­(unrequited?)

The story is now carried on in prose (my informant having forgotten the text of the ballad), and says that “Lady Mary wanted or challenged him to meet her in a masquerade” (probably meaning a duel in disguise), “and that his father told him to go.”  Neither father nor son seems to have known the fair challenger’s rank, though the following words point to their being aware of her sex, for the elder Falconer is represented as saying,

  If she is rich she will raise your fame,
  And if poor you are the same.
]

OUR HOME IN THE TYROL

CHAPTER III.

We were soon comfortably settled in the old Hof.  The spacious rooms, always deliciously cool, were fragrant with rare and delicate blossoms—­Alpine roses from the rocks, white lilies from Moidel’s special little garden-plot, grasses and nodding flowers, campanulas, veronicas, melisot, potentillas and lady’s bedstraw, which, according to Anton, no cattle would touch, whilst the roots of others were good for man or beast, their various qualities being all known to him.  But soon the waving flowers bent beneath the scythe.  It was the eve of St. Peter and St. Paul’s Day, a festival when all work must cease, and the Hofbauer, whose word was law, had given orders that the hay in the wood-meadow must be carried that evening.  Seeing, therefore, that the more hands there were the better, the two Margarets seized each a rake and worked as hard as any woman in the field.

On we labored, the golden evening sun glinting down upon our picturesque row of haymakers, nor did we cease until the angelus sounded from the village spire.  Then Anton, Jakob, Moidel, their men and maids, fell devoutly upon their knees and thanked God that Christ Jesus had been born.  These humble Tyrolese remember thrice daily to praise the Lord, as David did.  With a hushed, subdued look upon their honest faces, they arose, and we joining them the fresh, fragrant hay was carted triumphantly home.  The hay is cut long before we should consider it ready, and is housed whilst still green and moist.  The newer the hay the richer the cream, they say.  The Hofbauer has three crops yearly, but his neighbors, who lie higher, have only two, and sometimes but one.

The good old Kathi stood at the door cooling a gigantic pan of buckwheat polenta, and when she had set down this dish, intended for the haymakers’ supper, she brought us each, as our pay, a couple of krapfen, which are oblong dough-cakes fried in butter.