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The Little Blind Girl

[ Roud 21222 ; VWML AW/5/16 ; Wiltshire 267 ; trad.]

Rosie Hood sang The Little Blind Girl on her 2017 RootBeat CD, The Beautiful & the Actual. She noted:

From a collection of Alfred Williams’ folk songs. There is no recorded source or a collected location. Williams didn’t publish it as he did with many of his other songs and it makes me wonder if he wrote it.

Lyrics

Rosie Hood sings The Little Blind Girl

’Twas a drear November morning when the air was dull and chill,
When we spied the poor blind girl left to die upon the hill;
In her hand a written paper told her history, short but sad,
Why thus lovely, blind and starving, and why left so thinly clad.

It said the hand of sickness reft away her infant sight,
And the hand of death had left her motherless and orphan quite;
But I know how a father thus could leave this blind child there,
Was it done with selfish feeling, or in passion’s wild despair?

But alas! We must remember, as his was an even mind,
And he thought the girl, how useless, helpless, burdensome and blind,
But we know not of his feelings, if his breast but heaved a sigh,
As he left that little lone one on the hillside there to die.

On that drear November morning with the air so dull and chill,
Heard we thus the poor, blind girl crying, moaning on the hill –
“Oh it rains, the wind is blowing. Mother, Mother, let me in.”
Sadly, sadly, she was crying, wrapped in garments far too thin.

Many friends the orphan helping, pitying her sad distress,
With the hand of live and kindness seek to comfort, cheer and bless;
And within our home of plenty, there to tend with love and care,
And the name by which we call her is the little gathered Pearl.