Excerpt from Rural Tales: Ballads, and Songs The Poems here offered to the public were chiefly written during the interval between the concluding and the publishing of 'The Farmer's Boy, ' an interval of nearly two years. The pieces of a later date are, 'The Widow to her Hour-Glass, ' 'The Fakenham Ghost, ' 'Walter and Jane, ' &c. At the time of publishing the Farmer's Boy, circumstances occurred which rendered it necessary to submit these poems to the perusal of my friends; under whose approbation I now give them, with some confidence as to their moral merit, to the judgment of the public. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.