19.

'I meant to make my bed fu' wide,
But you may make it narrow,
For now I've nane to be my guide,
But a deid man drowned in Yarrow.'

20.

An' aye she screighed and cried, 'Alas! Till her heart did break wi' sorrow, An' sank into her father's arms,

'Mang the dowie dens o' Yarrow."

In thus producing for the first time an additional version of the ballad of the Yarrow, I may be properly asked to give my ground and authority. This I readily do. The version is due to the memory and the care of an old man in Peeblesshire, now deceased, who was a worthy type of what is best in our fast-decaying old-world character-its simplicity, homeliness, and steady uprightness. The late William Welsh, Peeblesshire cottar and poet, as he was wont to designate himself-being the author of a volume of poems and tales relating to local topicsgave me the poem, of which the above is an exact copy. I knew the old man well. He was, whe I first became personally acquainted with him, above seventy years of age, but hale, healthy, and in perfect possession of his faculties, shrewd, acute, and much above the common. For several years he paid me an annual visit. I had great pleasure in his conversationgenial, humorous, pawky. He moralised as only a Scotsman can; but his epigrammatic flashes kept his sententiousness from being prosy. He wrote out for me the version of the ballad as I have given it, stating very explicitly that it was from the recitation of his mother and grandmother. I questioned him closely on the point, but to this statement he steadily adhered. I asked him to give me answers to certain questions in writing, which he did.

The ballad, he said, was recited by his mother, his grandmother had a copy of the same in her father's handwriting, and thus the poem came down to him. As dates are of importance in a case of this sort, I got from him a statement in writing in answer to questions on those points, and also other corroborative particulars. These are to the following effect:

Robert Welsh great-greatgrandfather of W. Welsh-was born about 1686, died 1766. He farmed Faldonside, near Abbotsford, well known as once the property of the Ker who held the pistol to Mary's bosom on the night of Rizzio's slaughter. His son married Janet Lees, from Galashiels, who was born 1726, died 1789. Their son married Margaret Yule, who was born at Falahill, in Heriot, in 1761, and died in 1819. William Welsh himself was born at Heriot Tower, 6th May 1799, and left it in 1819. "The grandmother," William Welsh writes, "had a fine ear for music, and had a copy of the song in her father's writing (queer crooked letters), which Mr Haig, the schoolmaster of Heriot, could read fluently, and called it the Queen Anne's hand. He transcribed it into the modern style, and gave a copy to my mother (who was also very musical) for the sake of [I suppose he means in place of] the old manuscript. I kept Haig's copy till it got into pieces, and was lately burnt when cleaning the house."-(Letter, 14th February 1878.) This would take the MS. of the ballad back at least to the early part of last century. William Welsh adds the following: "An old woman, a mantua - maker, whose name was Marion Tod, and whose house I frequented often when a boy of seven years, sung it exactly the same way; and

many youngsters came to hear auld Gifford, as they called her, because she came from thereabouts, sing the Dowie Dens o' Yarrow.' Once, when I was a young man, I was singing it to a young lass and an old maid; and when I had done, I turned up the young one's head, which was hanging very low, and saw the tears on her cheeks; and the old one, looking serious, said, 'Poor man! I could ha'e liket him mysel'."-(Letter, 14th February 1878.) If these statements are even generally correct and I see no ground to doubt them, even as to details this version of "The Dowie Dens" is older than the earliest printed fragment by Herd, and probably as early as Rare Willy's drowned in Yarrow," first printed by Ramsay in 1724. Sir Walter Scott's version is confessedly a compilation; Motherwell's, taken from the recitation of an old woman in Kilbarchan, is still later. All this points to the conclusion that we have in the version now offered the oldest, probably the original, ballad of The Dowie Dens of Yarrow."

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This conclusion is strengthened if we look to internal evidence. The whole tone and frame of this ballad are from beginning to end simple, uniform, consistenta unity of narrative feeling. The stanzas which in the other two ballads are incongruous find here their natural place. There is ample, intelligible motive for the slaughter of the lover. He is no knight or noble lord, as in Scott's ballad, but an ignoble person-" a servan' lad in Gala." This base personage has dared to fall in love with a daughter of Scott of Dryhope,one of the most ready freebooters on the Border,-the laird of those glens of Dryhope and Kirkstead that run up through varied heather and bracken sheen to the Black

law and the heights of Glenrath— Hopes which now we love and prize for matchless charm, for gleam and murmur of burn, for solitary birk that drapes the seldom visited linn pool - Hopes which the reiver cared for, because they could conveniently conceal, say, four hundred kine taken from Bewcastle Waste on the English side. More than all, this love is reciprocated: the daughter of Dryhope finds some manliness, some nobility in the "servan' lad in Gala," who may possibly never have ridden in a reiver's band. This surely was an out-of-the-way lass in those times, with some strange modern notions worthy of the evolution of the two hundred years that followed. But her brothers do not at all like this sort of arrangement-"a servan' lad in Gala" forsooth! Here is a motive for his being put out of the way at once ere he marries their sister,-tenfold more powerful in those times than any question about dower, or even hatred from blood-feud. For this latter motive did not prevent marriages between families, even while bloodfeuds were unstanched. Witness Kers and Scotts, and Peeblesshire alliances many.

Then here comes the romance part of the affair-the fitting explanation of how the incompatibility of circumstances was to be dealt with. And this is how the minstrel pictures it. The father of the lady, hopeless of breaking down her love, proposes that the "servan' lad" should fight the nine lords-that is, lairds, for lord means no more than this,simply, at the utmost, lord of a barony-who are suitors for his daughter's hand. She is called "The Rose of Yarrow;" and while this phrase does not occur in Scott's version, it is to be

That Logan was a plagiarist there is, I fear, other proof.

The maiden searching, finds her dead lover in the water. He had been violently slain, and then brutally thrown into the stream. This is the reconciliation of the dénouement of the two ballads, "Willy's drowned in Yarrow" and the modern "Dowie Dens." The stricken man lay in the

"Cleavin o' the craig, She fand him drowned in Yarrow."

Then there comes a stanza, not found in Scott's version-picturesque, touching, complete in itself -such as painter might limn, and, doing it well, make himself immortal:

"His hair it was five quarters lang,

Its colour was the yellow;
She twined it round her lily hand,

And drew him out o' Yarrow."

What a picture! the lass wading, it may be, into the water, grasping the floating yellow hair, twining it round her lily hand,how despairingly yet how fervently,-clasping it, the last tie amid the moving stream, and drawing him tenderly out of the water flow to the river bank, where at least he would unmoved lie,-be, though dead, her own.

Though there is nothing in Scott's version corresponding to this, there is a stanza in Motherwell's, but it is a bad version. It is not his but her own hair which is spoken of, and she manages to draw him out of the stream by this!

"Her hair it was five quarters lang,

'Twas like the gold for yellow; She twisted it round his milk-white hand,

And she's drawn him hame frae Yar

row.

There can hardly be a question

that the original version is much more natural and appropriate, as referring to the hair of the dead lover, lying in the water. "The milk-white hand" milk-white hand" is certainly that of the lady, not the man. Then the simple drawing him out of the stream by the hair, the putting him on the milk-white steed, and bearing him home from Yarrow, is a representation infinitely superior to the coarse idea of "drawing him hame frae Yarrow" by his locks, as pictured in Motherwell's version.

Then there is the solution of another incongruity. Stanza 18 is obviously the original of the second stanza in "Willy's drowned in Yarrow," where as it stands it has no relevancy whatever. Here it is in a form that is perfectly natural and appropriate. meant," says the maiden lover,

"I meant to make my bed fu' wide,

But you may make it narrow, For now I've nane to be my guide,

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But a deid man drowned in Yarrow."

How thoroughly superior to the incongruous stanza of "Willy's drowned in Yarrow "! Not

"Yestreen I made my bed fu' wide." but

"I meant to make my bed fu' wide,

And you may make it narrow." You, if not the slayer of my lover, yet the sympathiser with the assassins!-do as you choose with me. The guide of my life is gone; the light is cast out with the "deid man drowned in Yarrow."

The stanza (16) which contains a reference to the "well-strand,”— the rivulet flowing from the spring -her washing his wounds therein and drying them "wi the hollan',"is very true, natural, and touching. It is thoroughly Scottish in feeling,

fact, and diction. Has not one heard of "the well-strand,"—" the meadow well-strand," from one's boyhood? And "the hollan"," we know well. All through those old times, down to the middle of the eighteenth century, the brown linen made out of the flax in Scotland, and made largely, was sent across to Holland Haarlem especially to be bleached. There it was dipped in lye and buttermilk; and after six months-from March to October---returned to this country, pure, clean, and white. The damsel wished to honour her dead lover, as best she might, with the purest in her gift. It was what she wore in her

Joy :

"Her kurchy was of Holland clear, Tyed on her bonny brow."

With regard to the historical reference of the original ballad, I confess I can say very little. If it really concerns a daughter of the house of Dryhope, as it seems to do, this would bring the date not further back than the middle of the sixteenth century, when the foreststead of Dryhope was given to a Scott. It is quite probable, of course, that the same family might have been there long before, simply as keepers for the Crown of the forest-stead. In the alleged residence of the lady at Dryhope,-in the phrases, "The fairest flower in Yarrow," ," "The Rose of Yarrow," we have a distinct suggestion of "the Flower of Yarrow,"-that is, Mary, rather Marion Scott, daughter of John Scott of Dryhope, not Philip, as Sir Walter Scott puts it, who was married to Wat of Harden in 1576. It seems to me possible, even indeed probable, from those references-the first, the oldest yet ascertainedthat the ballad may actually refer to Mary Scott, the " Flower of Yar

row." This incident may have been an episode in her life that took place previously to her marriage with Scott of Harden. There must have been associations with this woman of quite a special kind, apart simply from the ordinary occurrence of her marriage with a neighbouring Border laird and reiver, which led to the intense, widespread, and persistent memory of her that has come down to our own day. This of course would imply that the falling into the father's arms, which fitly concludes the ballad, did not mean the conclusion of her career. The terminations of ballads of this class are usually in the same conventional style. And probably "the Flower of Yarrow" was no exception to the run of her sex in having more than one love experience.

The truth of the view now given seems to me to be confirmed by the unsatisfactory nature of the historical references adduced by Sir Walter Scott in illustration of the ballad and of other suggestions made since his time. The duel on Deuchar Swire must be set aside as having no direct bearing on the circumstances; and certain important particulars of the narrative cannot be explained by supposing the ballad to refer to the "Walter Scott of Tuschielaw" who eloped with Grisel Scott of Thirlestane in 1616, and who is assumed to be the Walter Scott slaughtered shortly afterwards by Scott of Bonnington and his accomplices. I think it probable, however, that these later incidents may have come to be mixed up with the earlier in popular tradition and song, and thus with the story and the fate of the "servan' lad in Gala." Hence the double reference in Scott's ballad, confessedly a compilation from different versions. JOHN VEITCH.