This bittersweet ballad takes the form of a dialogue between two lovers. One of them, the woman, goes away on a long journey across the sea and during the first six verses the pair go back and forth as she warns him she "might be gone a long old time."

The last three are all spoken by the man who has been left behind and is slowly witnessing the relationship crumbling before him. When, she writes him a letter saying she may never come back, he requests a gift that would be something to remember his love by - "Spanish boots of Spanish leather."