_
Herein come ye no more,
Till a child of a maid be born,
And upon the rood rent and torn,
To save all that ye have forlorn, _lost._
Your wealth for to restore.
Eve laments bitterly, and at length offers her throat to her husband,
praying him to strangle her:
Now stumble we on stalk and stone;
My wit away from me is gone;
Writhe on to my neck-bone
With hardness of thine hand.
Adam replies--not over politely--
Wife, thy wit is not worth a rush;
and goes on to make what excuse for themselves he can in a very simple
and touching manner:
Our hap was hard, our wit was nesche, _soft, weak,_ still in use in
To Paradise when we were brought: [some provinces.
My weeping shall be long fresh;
Short liking shall be long bought. _pleasure._
The scene ends with these words from Eve:
Alas, that ever we wrought this sin!
Our bodily sustenance for to win,
Ye must delve and I shall spin,
In care to lead our life.
_Cain and Abel_ follows; then _Noah's Flood_, in which God says,
They shall not dread the flood's flow;
then _Abraham's Sacrifice_; then _Moses and the Two Tables_; then _The
Prophets_, each of whom prophesies of the coming Saviour; after which we
find ourselves in the Apocryphal Gospels, in the midst of much nonsense
about Anna and Joachim, the parents of Mary, about Joseph and Mary and
the birth of Jesus, till we arrive at _The Shepherds_ and _The Magi, The
Purification, The Slaughter of the Innocents, The Disputing in the
Temple, The Baptism, The Temptation_, and _The Woman taken in Adultery_,
at which point I pause for the sake of the remarkable tradition embodied
in the scene--that each of the woman's accusers thought Jesus was writing
his individual sins on the ground.
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