'"O choose, O choose, Lady Marg'ret," he cried, "O whether will ye gang or bide?" "I 'll gang, I 'll gang, Lord William," she said, "For you 've left me no other guide." He lifted her on a milk-white steed, And himself on a dapple grey, With a buglet horn hung down by his side, And slowly they both rade away. O they rade on, and farther on, By the lee licht o' the moon, Until they cam' to a wan water, And there they lichted them doon. "Hold up, hold up, Lord William," she said, "For I fear that ye are slain." "'Tis naething but the shadow of my scarlet cloak That shines in the water so plain."' The man who can listen to these lines without a thrill is proof against the Ithuriel spear of Romance. He is not made of penetrable stuff, and need waste no thought on the Scottish ballads. To close the tale comes that colophon that as naturally ends the typical ballad as 'Once upon a time' begins the typical nursery tale: 'Lord William was buried in St. Mary's Kirk, Lady Margaret in St. Mary's Quire; And out of her grave there grew a birk, And out of the knight's a brier. And they twa met and they twa plait, As fain they wad be near; And a' the world might ken right well They were twa lovers dear.' Birk and brier; vine and rose; cypress and orange; thorn and olive--the plants in which the buried lovers of ballad romance live again and intertwine their limbs, vary with the clime and race; and just as the 'Black Douglas' of the Yarrow ballad--'Wow but he was rough!'--plucks up the brier, and 'flings it in St. Mary's Loch,' the King, in the Portuguese folk-song, cuts down the cypress and orange that perpetuate the loves of Count Nello and the Infanta, and then grinds his teeth to see the double stream of blood flow from them and unite, proving that 'in death they are not divided.' The scene of the Scottish story is supposed to be Blackhouse, on the Douglas Burn, a feeder of the Yarrow, the farm on which Scott's friend, William Laidlaw, the author of _Lucy's Flittin'_, was born. Seven stones on the heights above, where the 'Ettrick Shepherd,' with his dog Hector, herded sheep and watched for the rising of the Queen of Faery through the mist, mark the spot where the seven bauld brethren fell.