This is one of the many fine musical settings of Kipling's poems by the late Peter Bellamy. The poem itself is from Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill, a collection of stories in which Puck transports children to different times in English history. Smuggler's Song came after a story called "Dymchurch Flit". In the poem, Kipling sets off the "Five and twenty ponies" verse as though it should be a chorus; Peter Bellamy didn't use it that way. My husband and I learned it from Barrand and Roberts at Augusta one year, and decided it needed to be a chorus song, so we changed the words back to those of the original poem (John and Tony had morphed them a bit) and put the chorus in after every two verses - just like PennyS and Branwen typed it out. I guess great minds think alike...

As an aside, I decided to learn the song because a tacky historical romance about smugglers in the Napoleonic era by Joan Aiken Hodge that I loved as a teenager was titled Watch the Wall, My Darling...