A courting rhyme in old Scots dialect, with a girl sealing a letter to her miller sweetheart, dusty coat, dusty kiss and all. Words like 'siller' for silver make it a nice one for slightly older children curious about how English used to sound.
From Mother Goose / Nursery Rhymes (traditional). See the whole collection.
Margaret wrote a letter,
Sealed it with her finger,
Threw it in the dam
For the dusty miller.
Dusty was his coat,
Dusty was the siller,
Dusty was the kiss
I'd from the dusty miller.
If I had my pockets
Full of gold and siller,
I would give it all
To my dusty miller.
About this rhyme
Traditional Scottish rhyme
A Scottish rhyme, and you can hear it in the words. 'Siller' is Scots for silver, meaning money, and the miller is 'dusty' because grinding grain covered him in flour from head to toe. Under the odd lines it is a small love song. A girl called Margaret sends a letter she has sealed with her own finger, and says she would give all the gold and silver she owned to the floury miller she is fond of.
The words will be new to most children, so this is a good one for a little translating. Show them how you seal a letter with a pressed finger, and explain 'siller' once. There is no big action here. Read it mainly for the roll of the sounds, and let the picture of a man covered head to foot in flour do the rest.
Public domain. Text from The Real Mother Goose (Blanche Fisher Wright, 1916), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition