Is it not significant that Melrose and Abbotsford, where a later and greater wizard wrought his spells over the valley of the Tweed and Ettrick Forest, should be half-way between the chief scenes of our Fairy Ballads--between the Rhymer's Tower and Carterhaugh? Fair Janet's conduct, when forbidden to come or go by Carterhaugh, where Yarrow holds tryst with Ettrick, lest she might encounter the Young Tamlane, may be traced back to the Garden of Eden, and is of a piece with that of Mother Eve: 'Janet has kilted her green kirtle A little abune her knee; And she has braided her yellow hair A little abune her bree; And she 's awa' to Carterhaugh As fast as she could gae.' There she falls in with the 'elfin grey' who might have been an 'earthly knight'; and he tells her how, as a youth, he had been reft away to fairyland: 'There cam' a wind out o' the north, A sharp wind and a snell; A deep sleep cam' over me And from my horse I fell'; as happened to 'Held Harald' and his men in the German legend. But he also tells her how, by waiting at the cross road at midnight on Halloweve, 'when fairy folk do ride,' she may win back the father of her child to mortal shape. That waiting on the dreary heath while 'a north wind tore the bent,' and what followed, become the ordeal of Janet's love: 'Aboot the dead hour o' the night She heard the bridles ring; And Janet was as glad o' that As any earthly thing. And first gaed by the black, black steed, And then gaed by the brown, But fast she gripped the milk-white steed And pu'ed the rider down'; and holding her lover fast, through all his gruesome changes of form, she 'borrowed' him from the 'seely court,' and saved him from becoming the tribute paid every seven years to the powers that held fairydom in vassalage. Another series of transmutations, familiar in ballad and folklore, is that in which the powers of White and Black Magic strive for the mastery, generally to the discomfiture of the latter, after the manner of the Hunting of Paupukewis in _Hiawatha_. The baffled magician or witch--often the mother-in-law or stepmother, the stock villain of the piece in these old tales--alters her shape rapidly to living creature or inanimate thing; but fast as she changes the avenger also changes, pursues, and at length destroys. In the ballad of _The Twa Magicians_, given in Buchan's collection, it is virtue that flees, and wrong, in the shape of a Smith, of Weyland's mystic kin, that follows and overcomes.