Midnight courtships were quite as injurious as midnight meetings of young witches and rattling warlocks. Among the agricultural classes the ordinary time for courting is still, in many parts of Scotland--as it used to be universally--the middle of the night. A farmer’s swain--with an all-overishness about him for a particular lass, with whom he may have had a _crack_ ‘’twixt the gloaming an’ the murk, when the kye comes hame’--will rise at midnight, walk over to his lady’s bower, and find her ready and willing to let him in, as the lady did Finlay, in the ballad, or go down to him, and walk and talk and enjoy ‘courtship,’ till the dawn, if it be summer-time, bids the rustic Romeo and Juliet depart. The report of the Royal Commissioners may be studied for the prose as well as the poetical side of this strange method of wooing--a method sanctioned by parents and not ill-thought of by friends, seeing that such was the course of their wooing an’ wedding, an a’. This custom is, doubtless, referred to in Joanna Baillie’s ballad--‘It fell on a morn when we were thrang’-- When the clocksy laird o’ the warlock glen, Wha waited without, half blate, half cheery, And lang’d for a sight o’ his winsome deary, Raised up the lattice an’ cam’ crousely ben. His coat was new an’ his o’erlay was white; His mittens an’ hose were cozie and bien; But a wooer that comes in braid daylight Is no like a wooer that comes at e’en. We may conclude, on other ballad evidence, that it was right unseemly for the lassie to make the first step in this owl-like courtship. The ballad of ‘The Maid gaed to the Mill’ is a warning. She pretended to go merely to get her corn ground, but really that the miller might make love to her-- The maid’s gane to the mill by night, Hech hey, sae wanton! The maid’s gane to the mill by night, Hey, sae wanton she!