"I have been wondering," the old man said, absently, and without answering her question, "since I came into this room, whether it would be possible to classify them into ballads of action and ballads of the supernatural. I imagine the former belong more to the south country; and that most of the latter had their origin in the north. And yet even in the Battle of Otterburn, the Douglas says ’But I hae dreamed a dreary dream, Ayont the Isle o’ Skye,— I saw a deid man win a fight, And I think that man was I.’ Well, that may have been an interpolation; at all events, it is a Highland touch; the strong, brisk, matter-of-fact Border ballad has seldom anything of that kind in it. The bold Buccleuch and Kinmont Willie were too much in the saddle to have time for wraiths. You remember, Maisrie, when they brought word to ’the bauld Keeper’ that Kinmont Willie was a captive in Carlisle Castle?— He has ta’en the table wi’ his hand, He garred the red wine spring on hie— ’Now a curse upon my head,’ he cried, ’But avenged on Lord Scroop I’ll be! O is my basnet a widow’s curch, Or my lance a wand of the willow-tree, Or my arm a lady’s lily hand, That an English lord should lichtly me?’ That is more like the ballad of the south: sharp and vivid, full of action and spirit, and the audacious delight of life: when you want mystery and imagination and supernatural terrors you must turn to the brooding and darkened regions of the north. The Demon Lover is clearly of northern origin; its hell is the Scandinavian hell; not the fiery furnace of the eastern mind, but a desolation of cold and wet. ’O what’n a mountain’s yon,’ she said, ’Sae dreary wi’ frost and snow?’ ’O yon is the mountain o’ hell,’ he cried, ’Where you and I maun go!’" "The Demon Lover?" said Maisrie, inquiringly; and Vincent could not but notice how skilfully and sedulously she fanned the old man’s interest in this new scheme by herself pretending to be deeply interested. "Don’t you know it, Maisrie?" said he. "It is the story of two lovers who were parted; and he returns after seven years to claim the fulfilment of her vows; and finds that in his absence she has taken someone else for her husband. It is a dangerous position—if he wishes her to go away with him; for a woman never forgets her first lover; what is more, she attributes all the natural and inevitable disillusionment of marriage to her husband, whilst the romance attaching to her first love remains undimmed. Therefore, I say let Auld Robin Gray beware!—the wife is not always so loyal to the disillusioniser as was the Jeannie of the modern song. Well, in this case, she who has been a false sweetheart, proves a false wife— ’If I was to leave my husband dear, And my twa babes also, O where is it you would tak’ me to, If I with thee should go?’